Amsterdam

Thursday, June 20th

I have learned that one of the best ways to get a feel for a city is take one of their transportation tours, either bus or boat. They drive (float) you past the important sites and give you information about them. If you're smart it can even help you figure out where the things you want to visit are. So, Jocelyn and I began our weekend in Amsterdam with the hop on hop off canal boat tour.

 

I loved the canal boat. If I remember correctly the city of Amsterdam is actually below sea level. They dug the canals lower so that the water would fill the canals and the land would be dry above. A little bit of modern day Genesis. While floating by on the canal boat you get to see all of the awesome houses which have been built squashed right up next to each other. They have these really great rooflines, which have a name but I can't remember it. (This is why you shouldn't wait a month to blog about things.)

 

At one stop the boat driver gave us a minute to get off and take pictures. And we found these wooden shoes.

 

 

I noticed that some of the buildings weren't exactly straight on their foundations. Kind of like leaning towers of Amsterdam. It was funny to see them pulled away from the building next to them.

 

 

After leaving the boat we walked through the flower market and headed to the famous Nine Streets which are known for their shopping. We stopped in one shop for Jocelyn to look at a wallet and I asked the shop lady to orient my map for me. Once I knew which direction I was facing I was able to take us to Pancakes! It's a tiny restaurant which does Dutch pancakes, which are a lot like really giant crepes that haven't been folded up. I had one with Brie and raspberry jam.

 

 

We hit the restaurant just in time because it started to rain. We spent a while hopping from shop to shop trying not to get soaked. After the rain let up a bit we went to the Anne Frank house. The line seemed pretty long. Jocelyn bet it would take us at least two hours to get in and I said 45 minutes. The line was long but it moved fast and I won the bet. It was fascinating to see the building that Anne Frank and her family hid in during World War II. Her father wanted the rooms to remain empty to indicate what had been lost, so there isn't any furniture or anything in the hidden apartment. They have a scale model of the apartment with furniture that you see before you go in the rooms. It doesn't seem like it wasn't that crowded when you look at the model but once you enter the apartment you can tell how cramped it would have been for that many people.

 

They had videos of interviews with Anne's father and a friend who had been in the same a concentration camp as her. So you get to hear a little bit more about what happens after the diary stops. They also had more information about her life before and what Anne was like. It was so sad to imagine this little girl having her life taken away.

 

The museum also had a big display set up after you go through the house. It had a lot of monitors set up in a square. In the middle were lots of sets of buttons, one red and one green in each pair. The monitors would give you a small biography about a person and then tell a story about how that person's rights may or may not have been taken away. At the end it asked if you agreed with a certain law or ruling dealing with the story. The one I remember was about someone of the Muslim faith being allowed to wear the head covering that men wear while serving in the US army. Once the story was over people could vote with the buttons. Then the screens showed what the results were for the people currently voting and then what they were for all the people who had visited the museum and voted. I thought it was a really great way to get people to think about human rights and to not just forget what they had experienced in the museum but apply it to the present day.