railed

— छह हज़ार उनसठ — Not much to report on today. Shobhit picked me up after work so we could go straight down to Costco and get some Omeprazole (heartburn medicine) that's one sale; we went home and heated leftovers for dinner. Shobhit got all into his MSNOW shows even though his only option is to listen to the audio versions online. I went into the bedroom and thought: I want to watch a movie. Okay, first I attempted to start the Hulu show Love Story about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. I got bored within five minutes and turned it off. I gravitated toward the 2014 Christopher Nolan film Interstellar instead, which I saw twice in theaters, then watched again on DVD in 2020. I did a bit of research to figure all this out and properly log all the times I've watched it on Letterboxd. I was fascinated to realize that when I last watched it, in 2020, it was six years since its release; it's now six years since then. I only got about a third of the way through it though. Shobhit came into the room with his laptop, looking up stuff about Amsterdam, and that wound up taking my attention for basically the rest of the evening. — छह हज़ार उनसठ — — छह हज़ार उनसठ — Shobhit has been trying to find a way that any kind of public transit pass might be worth buying, but I really don't think it's going to work out. There are some pass options, but the only ones that cover all transit agencies is both expensive and difficult to obtain if you do not have two different requirements, both a sort of ID you have to get and a European bank account. The IAmsterdam City Card we already ordered, which we will use the first three days in Amsterdam, will work on all local, city transit (not including the train from the airport, which is part of NS Rail, the national rail network), will be good enough. Everything else we'll have to pay for as we go along when we get on trams or trains or whatever. This did start from me looking up transit maps. I found this fantastic web page, part of the GVB website (Gemeente Vervoerbedrijf Amsterdam, or "Amsterdam Municipal Transport Company"), which provided separate context that clarified things for me in a way I had not yet managed: I'm finally starting to get it! The Amsterdam Rail Network for NS Rail, the national rail network, is what the train from the airport runs on, and it's why a ticket on that train does not count toward either the Metro or Tram trains, which are separate networks—those, indeed, are both part of GVB. Their Metro, which is essentially their subway system (they run both above and below ground), has five lines; their Trams, which runs exclusively above ground, consists of 15 lines. They also have a ferry system that's part of GVB, with a cluster of seven routs across the IJ waterway at the city center, and another cluster of three routes across the North Sea Canal, about 12 miles northwest of the city center. The GVB passenger ferries are free. That's not even to mention the couple of dozen GVB bus routes, which we will probably do our best to avoid, what with all the rail options. I'm just glad to finally have all this straight in my head; all these different transit agencies are easy to get confused by when first learning about them. And I haven't even gotten to the distinction between NS Rail, the national rail system in The Netherlands, and the Eurostar, which is the European rail system and what we will ride (and have already booked) from Amsterdam to Brussels and back. NS Rail even has two different types of trains, one called "Intercity" and one called "Sprinter," the latter counterintuitively being the one that has more stops between cities. The Intercity trains are longer distance, express routes between cities. See? I'm getting it! Good thing I managed this three weeks before we actually head over there. — छह हज़ार उनसठ — [posted 12:33pm]