Pray the name isn't Kone
If you ever get stuck in a lift, hope that it's not a lift where the emergency help system is managed by Kone.
I had a surreal experience last night, New Year's Eve, involving a Kone lift, three gorgeous women and a bottle of champagne.
We'd been celebrating the New Year Amsterdam-neighbourhood style, where you gather on the street corner just before midnight to toast in the New Year with your neighbours. Plenty of champagne and other beverages flowing freely to accompany the sound and light spectacle of fireworks going off everywhere. Very loud fireworks, especially the strings of Chinese firecrackers that were going off on just about every neighbourhood street corner (example pics on my moblog).
So at about half past midnight, we all traipsed back to Janine's place, next door to ours. Janine is the hostess with the mostest and we fully intended to continue our New Year celebration with more champagne, mince pies, etc.
Like ours, Janine's place is on the top floor. Unlike most apartment buildings in Amsterdam, though, we have lifts. No mountain-climbing steep flights of stairs in our neighbourhood!
Our lifts are quite compact so we took it in shifts: half of our group took the lift then sent it back down for the rest of us.
And so it was that Janine, Micky, Karen and I squeezed into the lift for our flight to the top floor. Except we didn't go up, we went down. About two feet, to the basement buffer. And stopped.
Uh oh. Door wouldn't open. None of the floor buttons would work. We were stuck.






























One of the things The Netherlands is well known for is flowers, tulips in particular. And there's one place in particular where you can see tulips of every single type imaginable. Not only tulips, but also other flowers including rare orchids.

I found another great one the other day - 
So I'm taking a ten-minute break this lunchtime, catching up with the newspapers (some dead-trees reading for a change) when I hear this loud 'bang' from outside along with people yelling.
If you're planning a move to The Netherlands, an event next month will help you find out everything you need to know about life in a new country.


