We arrived in Amsterdam on Tuesday afternoon after a three hour train ride from Brussels. We spent the afternoon and evening getting settled in our apartment rental and exploring the neighborhood. Our bedroom has a balcony that is right on a canal with beautiful views. We are in the Jordaan district, which is very ethnically diverse. It began as an area for immigrants, but now has become the place to be for students, young professionals, and artists of all kinds.
Today, we spent the day doing a lot more walking and exploring. We did the official Rick Steve's walk through the Jordaan district. The highlight of the walk for me was the Anne Frank Museum, which is located in the secret annex that she lived for just over two years during the Nazi occupation. Anne lived in the tiny space with her parents, her sister, and four other Jews before they were discovered and shipped off to Concentration camps. The eight people hid in less than 1,000 square feet and were unable to make a sound during the day (including flushing the toilet or running water) because her father's former business continued to operate on the main level of the building. It was heartbreaking to walk through the rooms, reading the excerpts from her diaries, and knowing that she wouldn't make it through the war alive. At one point, I noticed Anne's birth date--she was just eight days younger than my grandmother. Unlike the soldiers that we saw tributes for during our Flanders Fields tour in Belgium, the children that lived in this annex easily could have been alive today if it hadn't been for the Holocaust. Unfortunately, Anne and her sister died of typhoid in a Concentration Camp just weeks before it was liberated by the Allies. In fact, of the eight people that lived in the annex, only Anne's father, Otto, survived the Concentration Camps. It was his determination that got Anne's diaries published in 1947, and since then, they have been published in over 70 languages around the world. Seeing her deportation card, walking through the small rooms that served as her home for two years, and seeing pictures taken before the war was a moving experience.
For lunch, we decided to try a food that is popular in The Netherlands --herring! Jeremy had a herring sandwich, and I chickened out and got cod strips with tartar sauce. I did try a bite of his sandwich, but I'm very glad that I didn't have to eat the whole thing. It was very fishy, kind of mushy, and the smell was like a dirty aquarium.
We walked to the Hermitage Museum with plans to spend about three hours looking at paintings by Van Gogh and Rembrandt among others, but when we got there, they were just closing. We had gotten some bad information (from two different sources), so we came up with a second plan. We will do this museum tomorrow, and instead, we decided to do another Rick Steve's walk. This one would take us through a rather infamous district of Amsterdam--The Red Light District.
We stopped off at the beginning of the walk, so I could get some liquid courage in the form of a couple glasses of wine. I was rather uncomfortable with the thought of drug deals going down in front of me, naked people meandering through the streets, and money changing hands for activities that I didn't want or need to know about. Now, I'm sure that there were people buying drugs, plenty of naked people, and lots of money being spent on various activities; however, you can "experience" the district without experiencing all aspects of it. The drugs that we saw were in the form of "coffee houses," which are found throughout Amsterdam and sell marijuana and not actual coffee. The nudity that we saw was no more than you would see in a Victoria Secret catalog. And the activities that we saw taking place were mostly just tourists walking through the neighborhood. Now, if we had walked deeper into the alleys, entered any of the buildings, or wandered through later at night, I might have a much different (and more colorful) memory of the Red Light District.
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