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FEATURE

FILM

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTYLIFESTyLESPERSPECTIVESOPInIOnInTERVIEWTRAVELTEChnOLOgyCARTOOnTREnDSSPORTCLASSIFIEDS

vol. 4 #16 – 27 September 2011

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The Sentinel Amsterdam

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Editors – Gary Rudland & Denson PierreDesign, realisation and form – Andrei Barburas & No-Office.nlWebmaster – www.sio-bytes.tumblr.comWebhost – Amsterjammin.com

Contributors: Gerline Diboma den Hartog, Elaine McCormack, Sharmin de Vries, Simon Owusu, David King, Colin Bentley & Dirkje Bakker

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Terminal shopping

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TREnDS P. 35 SPORT P. 46 MORE:

On = Out; Off = In The Gold Room TEChnOLOgy P. 30MicroScorn

FILM REVIEW P. 34Room 2CCARTOOn P. 34

CLASSIFIEDS

‘Try to master the Zuiderzee’

‘Traditional retail is facing serious and sometimes deserved challenges’

‘It is much more difficult to set up a business in a duty-free environment’

‘The region is beautiful and historic, its history also makes it pretty rough’

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CUTThROATAMSTERDAM!

During short spells of pleasant weather there is an exceptional choice of things to do while in Amsterdam so the majority of the Sentinel crew went on a journey of adventure and nearby discovery. It was felt that we would try to master the Zuiderzee and some of us secretly had plundering in mind...

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TERMInAL shop

ping

‘As I spend so much time in airports, I get to know them all almost by heart’

Remembered as sitting patiently on a red plastic bench in Charles De Gaulle Interna-tional airport in Paris, Mehran Karim Nasseri, otherwise known as Sir Alfred Mehran, was an Iranian refugee who arrived on 8 August 1988 and, through no choice of his own, re-mained there until July 2006, surviving only through the kindness of airport employees and airline crew. This Interview with Marc Mansour from Geneva, Switzerland, provides an insiders view of the insular world of the airport terminal.

By Elaine McCormack

‘Whatever the airport and whatever the national-ity of the staff, they always smile and are so kind’

TERMInAL shop

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This very famous story is known throughout the world and prompted the Tom Hanks mov-ie The Terminal (2004). As a native Frenchman who has worked for a considerable time in airports, can you give us a brief insight into life beyond customs?Well, there are two ways of looking at it. From the normal passenger’s viewpoint, once they pass customs, it’s ‘just’ an airport for them. They are usually a little lost, looking at the screens to see where their gate is, then walking around, shopping and eating, while waiting to board their plane.On the other hand, when I pass the customs, I find myself in a familiar environment. What looks big and cold for most people just seems friendly and warm to me, as I spend so much time in airports, I get to know them all almost by heart.I think it’s fair to say that life beyond customs is another world. Since you don’t really see outside much, you get disconnected from time and location. Furthermore, in a lot of airports you’ll find plenty of passengers early in the morning or late at night, which is not the case on high streets or shopping malls.

For many years you have worked for various companies setting up stores and controlling operations in airports. Is there a sense of an international community behind passport control?There is something very funny about life in an airport. Because the environment is often so cold and unfriendly, people who work there are among the friendliest I get to meet in my line of business. Whatever the airport and whatever the nationality of the staff, they always smile and are so kind to me, just as they are to any kind of ‘normal’ passenger.

How do you cope with the lack of sunlight and sometimes even the lack of character in Duty Free? Do you not get fed up with the life of ‘cheese sandwiches ‘?It is true that airports are built in such a way, they rarely have any character. Nevertheless, some airports are cosier than others and I enjoy visiting them for business. But who knows? When you look at airports today compared to those of twenty years ago, maybe in another twenty years architects will start building warmer airports.I must admit that I do indeed lead a ‘cheese sandwich’ life, just because I don’t always have the time to take a proper

meal. But I must point out that more and more airports offer a good choice of restaurants, and that’s an improve-ment on a few years ago.

You travel a lot between Europe, the Middle East and the US. How do you cope with jetlag? Does it ever go away or has it simply become part of your normal life?Jetlag is never easy to handle, as is disturbs your internal clock. But the more you travel the more you can reduce the impact it has on you. But no matter what, the first two days at any destination with at least six hours time difference from my point of departure is always difficult.

As impressive as it is to have stamps from all over the world on your passport, do you find that this can sometimes be a hindrance and give rise to many unnecessary questions and suspicions at passport control?First of all, I have fewer and fewer stamps on my French passport, since travelling in Europe is always stamp-free.Concerning the questions and suspicions, sometimes they can be annoying, but the airport staff are simply doing their best to maintain passenger’s security. I think there will be a lot of improvements in the coming years in the way passengers are controlled.

Is it more difficult to set up/sell beyond customs, as opposed to regular high-street retailers, and do cultural differences play a bigger part in airport trading?Undoubtedly it is much more difficult to set up a business in a duty-free environment. The commercial areas are always limited and the number of passengers/custom-ers is constantly increasing. As such, a huge number of brands are trying to be there in order to get a piece of the delicious cake.But it’s worth the hard work. The duty-free environment is the only business in which purchasing goods or services is not the customers’ main concern. They are simply there to catch a plane. Since they have to wait, sometimes for several hours, and are more or less trapped in that environment, they often walk around the shops and do some purchasing, even if they weren’t planning on that at all. Shopping is an excel-lent time killer.

Living out of a suitcase, hit or miss?For sure: HIT!

Marc Mansour is Director at Wolford (Travel Retail).

‘I think there will be a lot of improvements in the coming years in the way passengers are controlled’

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24TRAVEL

Belgium: rOllINg HIlls TO cHErrY BEErs

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By Sharmin de Vries

For a sweet and brief escape into the land of a thousand beers and fine gastronomic endeav-ours, Belgium provides the perfect sojourn of indulgence for the Dutch. After numerous visits to Flanders, I recently embarked on a road trip to the French-speaking, rugged, less affluent, historic and catholic part of Belgium: Wallonia. This region is also known as the Belgian Ardennes, due to its many extensive forests, rolling hills and mountain range.

It was raining cats and dogs most of the weekend and en-tire villages seemed to be swallowed whole by the deluge, yet the medieval charm of the region still stood out. While driving around, stopping off at baroque churches and cafés became regular shelter haunts. I stayed close to the town of Dinant, which is steeped in history and was already populated during Neolithic, Celtic and Roman times. The town was also the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, who invented the saxophone, something in which Dinant obviously takes pride, since there are arty looking saxophones scat-tered along the main bridge and statues to the instrument in various parts of the town. The Gothic Collegiate Church of Notre-Dame is supposed to be Dinant’s signature land-mark but, in my opinion, restaurant La Broche deserves the honour. Not only does it serve the most amuse-bouches I’ve ever encountered in a restaurant (all excellent, by the way), but it is also the only restaurant in Dinant capable of providing such mastery. Following on from that, culinary expeditions became less successful. My countless cappuc-cinos made with watery coffee and whipped cream on top are testimony to that fact.

Long winding roads, characteristic rocky cliffs and grey-brick houses for miles on end – making you wonder if at some point in history there was a bulk sale of that par-ticular type of brick – sum up a large portion of Wallonia. While the region is beautiful and historic, its history also makes it pretty rough around the edges and makes you realise how much more well-off Flanders is.

After visiting countless charming villages, we decided to drive up to Charleroi to see about having lunch. Charleroi, the biggest city in Wallonia, is known to be very industrial and has ‘former glory’ written all over it. Rarely have I been to a city that is so desolate and unearthly. There were hardly any establishments open for business, on a Saturday no less, and if they were, you wouldn’t want to go within ten feet of them. We came, we saw and we got the hell out. Back to the winding roads, the quaint villages and eventually back to Dinant with enough eateries to satisfy our ensuing cravings.

On our final day, we decided that a pit stop in Antwerp was more than called for. So we drove there, parked the car near to the market square and found ourselves a res-taurant in the heart of the old city. The Grote Markt, as the square is called, is surrounded by the beautiful town hall and the houses of the guilds, with a towering cathedral standing tall and steep in the background. It felt like almost coming home. Add a traditional Flemish stew, chips and a tall cherry beer to the mix and you have the perfect recipe for ‘bliss’. I am by no means suggesting that Wal-lonia isn’t worth a visit. However, if you want to really get under the skin of what Belgians do formidably, which is to provide excellent culinary offerings, the French-speaking part of the country simply won’t suffice. Flanders still does it like nobody’s business.

‘The town was also the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, who invented the saxophone’

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‘Rarely have I been to a city that is so desolate and unearthly’

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‘Add a traditional Flemish stew, chips and a tall cherry beer to the mix and you have the perfect recipe for ‘bliss’’

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‘Microsoft have made a strategic move to create an operating system (OS) to ‘rule them all’’

‘Metro Style apps can be used on up to fi ve different Windows 8 systems’

MicroScorn

‘The Metro UI is very impressive and has its advantages over an icon based interface’

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Surprisingly, there is a new and innovative operating system that isn’t from Apple. Mi-crosoft Windows 8 Developer Preview was re-leased this month and is the next instalment following on from Windows 7. The full release will be available in the latter part of 2012.

With Windows 8, Microsoft have made a strategic move to create an operating system (OS) to ‘rule them all’ i.e. a single OS that will run on tablets, netbooks, laptops and desktops. This is very bold as software companies usually have an OS for their tablets and another for their laptops and desktops. Apple has iOS for its iPads and OS X Lion for its laptops and desktops. Microsoft has made a good attempt at unifying the two.

The most noticeable thing about Windows 8 is the new in-terface called Metro. The Metro User Interface (UI) is based on the classic Swiss graphic design style which emphasises cleanliness, readability and objectivity. Anyone with a Windows 7 mobile phone will be familiar with this type of interface. Based on signs from the King Country Metro transit system in Seattle (where Microsoft is situated), the UI incorporates large typography in colourful tiles. Each tile displays a subset of live information from an applica-tion. For example, the email tile will display the number of unread emails plus the subject and a few lines from the latest email. When you select that tile, it blows up into the full version of that application, in this case, the email client. In this clever way, the Metro UI focuses on the important data you need at a glance and via a gesture, you can delve deeper into the content associated with that tile (i.e. read the actual email).

The Metro UI triggers Metro Style Apps (applications), another new Windows 8 feature. These apps are launched when a Metro UI tile is selected. The apps can fill your entire screen to avoid distractions from other apps or you can pin them to different parts of your desktop. The Metro Style Apps and their settings can go with you wherever you login via your Microsoft account. You can log into another Windows 8 system and continue using it as if it were your own. The Metro Style Apps can only be downloaded from the Windows Store, but this allows for the apps to

be certified by Microsoft and screened for viruses. Metro Style apps can be used on up to five different Windows 8 systems.

Windows Live cloud synching plays a central role in Windows 8 by utilising the cloud to sync contacts, photos, languages, themes, application settings and other prefer-ences between different Windows 8 systems you access. This makes your Windows 8 system very portable, being with you wherever you can access another Windows 8 system, connected to the internet. Other Windows 8 fea-tures include a new Task Manager and Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer 10, System-wide spell checking and search features and Social Media integration, to name just a few of the three hundred new features.

Having tried out Windows 8, my verdict? Give credit where credit is due. The Metro UI is very impressive and has its advantages over an icon based interface. It is a step in the right direction after a very successful Windows 7. That said, this is a preview of an OS that is at least a year away. Microsoft is notorious for delays and therefore it could be a long wait for features that are already here. The Windows Store is the equivalent of the Apple Mac App Store (which allows users the ability to use download apps on unlimited systems, not just five), the Windows Live synching is on par with Apple’s MobileMe which is being revamped to an even better iCloud set-up this autumn. The Metro Style Apps success is heavily dependent on developers embrac-ing the platform which is uncertain and also beneath the fancy Metro UI still lies the same old Windows with all its associated problems (a nicer blue screen of death by the way!).

The Windows 7 Mobile phone was promising when it was launched and had lots of potential, but Microsoft did not build upon that impetus and it remains behind the iPhone and Android. Developers never embraced the platform and I fear Windows 8 will have a similar build up. Lots of potential, but a year away! By then the market would have moved so far forward that Windows 8 would be a little too late to sway devoted fans of other more innovative OSes. Windows 8 like every Windows OS before it will still dominate the market, but it just won’t be the best option out there.

By Simon Owusu

TechBit: Sio-Bytes

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www.concultancymarketmedia.com

yourobjective,ourresolution.

Room 2cfilm

When is it justifiable to stand against lawful authority that is mistreating its people? In this classic high-seas adventure we discover what a crew will take from its over-zealous captain before those tolerances are exceeded. This is a beautifully crafted film, which pits Clark Gable’s Mr Christian against Charles Laughton’s Captain Bligh. Enjoy watching these masters duel it out.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

FILM REVIEW 34

CartoonBy Colin Bentley

Did you know the hardest part of this job is figuring out who is drunk and who is just stupid?

43SPOTTED 35TREnDS

How old-fashioned shopping practices are the growing trend in the real world.

I have spent years reading envisioned doom scenarios on how our much-loved major city centres are about to change into ghost towns; ghetto-like jungles ringed by empty, dilapidated streets. The major and unrelenting growth of online consumerism would supposedly lead to hollowed-out shopping centres with only a few major flagship stores remaining. The only thing moving in the streets would be tumbleweed, like in classic Hollywood westerns, with dust playing in the sunlight. Our capital cities would change into places where the suburbs became the centre and the town centres a forgotten place, like dark holes in the middle of the universe that suck in everything that touches them.Anti-matter.

But no. It isn’t to be.

New research tells us that the current growing trend is no longer online shopping. It is actually old-fashioned, real-time, offline shopping that is up and coming. Appar-ently, the instant gratification, the shared experiences

By Dirkje Bakker

On = Out; Off = In

(the stories you can tell afterwards) and the social contact with other human beings are all major reasons to go out into the real world, instead of ordering stuff from behind your LCD screen while sat all alone in your one-bedroom apartment.

While traditional retail is facing serious and sometimes deserved challenges (bland chains, e-commerce, environ-mental impact, the financial crisis, demographics and anti-consumerism), most people do and will continue to enjoy going shopping in the real world. From Oxford Street to Kalverstraat to Fifth Avenue. In fact, rather than witnessing RETAIL RUIN, a RETAIL RENAISSANCE is in the making.

Smart retailers are defying doom and gloom scenarios, as they realise that shopping in the real world will forever satisfy consumers. Hence the flurry of new formats, tech-nologies, capabilities and products that now are delighting retail customers around the world.

The Real world strikes back. As far as shopping is concerned, offline is the new online. Now let’s see what happens to dating.

‘Online consumerism would supposedly lead to hollowed-out shopping centres’

‘Shopping in the real world will forever satisfy consumers’

CLASSIFIEDS 36

Amsterdam Property Finder is a company designed to help Expats go through the process of buying their own home.

What you will get from us:

Informal financial servicesWorking hours to suit you - evenings and weekends are normalIndependence from any other makelaar (real estate agent)Expert knowledge of the property marketYou will be accompanied through every stage of the processA bespoke serviceLow fees (about half of a Dutch makelaar)

W: www.AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

E: info@AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

Amsterdam Property Finder is a company designed to help Expats go through the process of buying their own home.

We will find you a home!

E: info@AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

T: +31 (0)6 46613315

Amsterdam Property Finder is a company designed to help Expats go through the process of buying their own home.

What you will get from us:

Informal financial servicesWorking hours to suit you - evenings and weekends are normalIndependence from any other makelaar (real estate agent)Expert knowledge of the property marketYou will be accompanied through every stage of the processA bespoke serviceLow fees (about half of a Dutch makelaar)

W: www.AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

E: info@AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

Amsterdam Property Finder is a company designed to help Expats go through the process of buying their own home.

We will find you a home!

E: info@AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

T: +31 (0)6 46613315

Amsterdam Property Finder is a company designed to help Expats go through the process of buying their own home.

What you will get from us:

Informal financial servicesWorking hours to suit you - evenings and weekends are normalIndependence from any other makelaar (real estate agent)Expert knowledge of the property marketYou will be accompanied through every stage of the processA bespoke serviceLow fees (about half of a Dutch makelaar)

W: www.AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

E: info@AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

Amsterdam Property Finder is a company designed to help Expats go through the process of buying their own home.

We will find you a home!

E: info@AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

T: +31 (0)6 46613315

Amsterdam Property Finder is a company designed to help Expats go through the process of buying their own home.

What you will get from us:

Informal financial servicesWorking hours to suit you - evenings and weekends are normalIndependence from any other makelaar (real estate agent)Expert knowledge of the property marketYou will be accompanied through every stage of the processA bespoke serviceLow fees (about half of a Dutch makelaar)

W: www.AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

E: info@AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

Amsterdam Property Finder is a company designed to help Expats go through the process of buying their own home.

We will find you a home!

E: info@AmsterdamPropertyFinder.com

T: +31 (0)6 46613315

Get advice on housing, rental contracts and apartments in Amsterdam

www.wswonen.nl/english

AMSTERDAMthe global expat network

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www.yourtuliptour.com

SPORT 38SPORT

What if?A question never supported in football but al-ways part of football fans’ repertoire of hope.

The game is played by mortals and, as such, factors like ageing and human fallibility readily impact upon performance and ultimately expectations. How else could we explain the situation at Chelsea, where we have had the most expensive out-and-out striker in world football, brought in to replace a rugged legend but, instead, seem-ingly incapable of matching the current scoring form of the older player, never mind those of his imposing top-flight game play of recent seasons?

Fernando Torres managed one of the misses of the 21st century on 18 September against Manchester United and one can only imagine that his hell cannot become any more unbearable. It could be that this is the lowest possible point in an already unbelievably sad demise of an active footballer and somehow, remarkably, he will kick on to something approaching at least 50% of the form he showed way back in 2008. Until such a time, or when he is simply sold to save the most basic remnants of his esteem from the unforgiving glare of the highly exposed English Premier League, it seems like the return of the veteran will be required to help Chelsea regain a cutting edge up front, thus shielding Torres from the now seemingly delusional expectations placed upon him as he carries that over-inflated price tag and salary.

As far as FFG-CL managers are concerned, Torres is a bust, so far. Maybe, just maybe, there can be wisdom in bringing him into a team if he does hit some sort of short-term form, which even modest players are able to muster. Chel-sea have a great number of matches in which to compete while he is still there, so there will be ample opportunity for him to score fantasy points for any manager brave enough to gamble his huge transfer fee.

Didier Drogba, on the other hand, has managed over the years to actually become an archetype of a highly effec-tive, domineering, unavoidably irritating uber-athlete and footballer. His recent mid-air knock-out was symbolic of maybe the only way defending teams can properly neutral-ise the threat on goal he constantly poses. It was good and shocking to be reminded that he, too, is but flesh, blood, neurones and able to be silenced in an instant. It can only be hoped, therefore, that Drogba was not referring to the performances of his team mate during this outburst: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkhQZNHcxmE

FFG-CL managers await his return to full fitness because, even if there are at least three young pretenders to the Chelsea throne of chief goal-getting ace, at thirty-three years of age Didier Drogba remains the most effective player at the club. Managers in here will be keeping an eye on his progress, as he still has the potential to equal and surpass the scoring feats with which the younger brigade at a few other clubs have painted the season, so far.

By Denson Pierre

The Gold Room

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Didier Drogba - Chelsea

© pieter bakker

CZECH REPUBLIC - STUNNINGLY DIFFERENT!

www.czechtourism.com

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