Amsterdam, day one

Readers of this blog will recollect the numerous times I've copped to being a nervous traveler.  I just get terribly anxious about making connections and getting to the right place.  It's particularly unsettling for me (and I imagine many others) when I don't know the language.  Dutch is one of those languages.

I have to say,  Dutch has always struck me as a "friendly"-sounding language.  I perceive the people speaking Dutch to be jovial, well-meaning people--which is a nice, though rather ridiculous, stereotype.  Still, I've come to realize I'm not as thrown here as I was say, in Turkey.  There's the added advantage of cognates in German, a language I used to know somewhat, and English, my native tongue.  I find myself tuning up my ears a bit to try and catch what I can.  Figuring out pronunciation helps somehow.  For instance, I was able to comprehend "next stop" fairly quickly while I was riding the bus from the airport this morning.  Of course, that wasn't terribly difficult.

All that said, I couldn't have had an easier trip from Duluth to Amsterdam.  I was able to get some good work done while at the Duluth airport yesterday afternoon.  My plane to Minneapolis landed early and, even more amazing, my plane to Amsterdam landed early (by 30 minutes, no less!).  I sailed through passport control, luggage retrieval and customs, and marched directly to the bus I needed to take into the city.  I bought my ticket (4 Euros--sooo cheap compared to what it would have cost to take a cab), and got quick and easy directions to the house where I'm renting a room (at 10 Euros per night!!!!!).

While my contact for the room arrangements wasn't home when I got here (due to my early arrival), Her neighbor across the hall managed to communicate with me that I should come in to her apartment to wait.  This lady spoke very little English (still--a LOT more than I speak Dutch), but we managed quite well.  Yet another resident stopped in and got me set up in my room.  It was all very easy.

My primary contact stopped in within an hour of my arrival and then proceeded to host me for coffee, sandwich and WI-FI hookup!  Talk about hospitality!  She tried to help me by-pass the lines at the Anne Frank House by purchasing the ticket on her credit card (with my reimbursement), but after a half hour of arduous effort, gave it up.

The walk to Anne Frank's house is less than 10 minutes from the place I'm staying.

One can see the Westerkerk from the bridge near "my" house.  I remember reading about the chimes from the bell tower of the Westerkerk in Anne's diary. 


The only "fly in the ointment" of my day was the rain.  It's been raining since we landed this morning.  My primary contact, Femmy, came to the rescue one more time and loaned me an umbrella, so I was good to go.

I caught a couple of fun images on my way to the Anne Frank house.

These pumpkins were sitting outside an Algerian restaurant, alongside a basket of fresh tomatoes.

 

I tried looking up information about this placque (if that's what it is), but was unsuccessful.  It appears to show sliver being turned in to gold through a castle.  I can't read the name at the top, but the date is 1985.  Still I thought it was interesting.

By the time I got to the museum, the line to get in stretched around the block.  I was committed to "doing" the museum today, so I just got in line and crawled with the rest of them up to the entrance. It was quite the international experience standing in line.  The people in front of me were speaking in Spanish, and the people behind me were speaking Italian.  There were people from all over Europe and Asia waiting to visit the museum.  Most disturbing were warnings about pickpockets.  Glad to report I didn't see any evidence of that problem.

The cost was 9 Euros, and the guards at the entrance were kind (and smart) enough to give those of us toting umbrellas plastic bags so that we wouldn't drip throughout the museum.  No large backpacks are allowed, purses may be searched, and photographs are prohibited.

It's a self-paced tour through a very spare space.  Once the plans for the museum were underway, Otto Frank had insisted that it be stripped of furnishings, and that's the way it appears today.  There were, however, numerous photographs of the rooms "staged" with furniture to show what it looked like while those eight people were trapped there for over two years.  There are also models, diorama cum dollhouse setups that show where the furniture was situated.

There's a liberty to taking in a place like this on your own.  You don't have to worry about someone else's schedule or museum modes (skimming versus poring over every word).

I have heard some people criticize the museum as not offering much, but I disagree.  I appreciated the approach the curators took in setting up the displays.  There's a power to seeing the actual diaries (she wrote quite a few between 1942 and 1944), and the pages she revised.  There were interpretive audio segments, film clips (most no longer than three minutes).

One of the most compelling features was the very last room featuring young people's experiences with bigotry and challenging issues of freedom (of religion, of sexual preference, of ideology, etc.) from around the world.  It's a Prezi-like presentation with films and polls assessing how audiences' respond to these issues.  Audience members are sitting on benches with buttons they can push to respond to screen commands.  The system then reports the present audience's responses and follows up with an accumulated total from all people who've responded in the past.  This part of the museum took the longest to process (or perhaps that was my jet lag kicking in), but I thought it was really important in highlighting some of Anne's most poignant messages regarding bigotry and prejudice.  In fact, I think it does an excellent job of blasting apart the old call for "tolerance", which was a big part of Otto Frank's platform in the 1950s and 1960s.  Additionally, the featured individuals are youth, which I think made it more compelling to a young audience (although us old folks sat and listened for at least 20 minutes, if not more).

I ended my visit with a trip to the bookstore.  I was very "weight" conscious with respect to my purchases.  I have to lug my backpack and suitcase (very small) on and off a number of trains over the next two weeks, and I just can't afford to take on too much more weight.  I think I made good choices, but I had to leave a couple of items I would have liked to buy because they were just too heavy and bulky (including a three dimensional 'Anne Frank House' kit and a 10 pound compendium of an inside look at the Anne Frank house).

I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open, so I'll bring this to a close.  I think this was an excellent first day.