Amsterdam, Holland, The Netherlands : Jan 16 – 19

I finally realized I’ve been in Europe for six months and I haven’t visited my Europe top 5 (or at least the ones I can go to since we can’t go to Israel) so this weekend I decided I had to get one of those off the list. I set out for Amsterdam for one reason, the Anne Frank huis.
I’ve flown through Amsterdam plenty of times and many people said it was a great city. I now agree. Lucky for you readers I had plenty of time to write this on my flights so there’s a lot to read. Holland is a province in The Netherlands, if you already know this then good for you but I’m still learning about geography and if names are interchangeable; I went outside the city hence Holland title.

Super early flight so I landed at 8am ready to get to my list of things to see. Big fan of Amsterdam transportation options- I bought an Amsterdam transportation card, a thick, paper, credit card sized thing with a chip in it which you scan every time you get on and off any form of transportation. I bought one for €28 which lasted 72 hours, a super good deal. I could take the train and a bus to my airbnb, train back to the city, and trams every where in the city as much as I wanted for three days. Well worth it considering the train from my airbnb to central station was over €3 just one way. 

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Corrie ten Boom

I didn’t even know about her or the book The Hiding Place until a week before my trip. Very good tour through the house and great guide who gave lots of information I appreciated considering I didn’t know the story at all. I walked out fully knowledgable and amazed, yet again, at the awesome stories of people who acted through faith years ago to save Jews. This tour was extra great because the guide spoke about how the family acted through faith to save these Jewish people, not just that they were good people and wanted to help. Always appreciative of a historical guide resting on faithful purposes. 

For reference, the house is an hour travel outside Amsterdam in Haarlem. Several people/things recommended Haarlem as its a small cute town outside the bigger city and has its own perks for tourists. Much like people say Lucerne is a must if you’re going to Zurich.

Photos below: the first is ground level view of the hole in the cabinet which went into the hiding place, the next is a little different view of realizing this truly was a hole they crawled through. It had weights connected to a false cabinet backing so when things were stacked in the cabinet it looked like the lower shelf but was actually the saving grace for several people.
-Standing in the dinning room, this wooden triangle symbol was placed in the window when it was safe for Jews to come and ask for help in hiding and moving.
-Outside the home/building. This would have been the clock shop Corries father owned.
-The church in the plaza area of Haarlem, one block around the corner from Corrie’s house.
-Down the alley/street outside Corrie’s house.

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Zandvoort

After finishing the house tour I realized how close I was to the coast and I can’t turn down a good sunset so I headed west. I ended up Zandvoort, walked the edge of the water, found a restaurant on the beach where I had a couple glasses of wine and watched the sunset over the water.
My ultimate happy place because of the healing and peace I always find in these quiet moments.
For dinner before heading back, I found an Italian restaurant called MMX, was the first one there four minutes after it opened and had amazing shrimp pasta with a couple of glasses of Pinot.

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De negen straatjes

Friday morning I found Bagels and Beans, name speaks for itself, where I had a mochaccino and bagel before wondering around De negen straatjes waiting for the Anne Frank tour. Nine streets is the name for nine cosy and picturesque shopping streets in the middle of the Unesco World Heritage Canal Belt. Honestly isnt much different than the other small canal streets, but a check in the box.

While not actually part of nine streets but very close is Cafe Chris which is the oldest “brown cafe” (bar) in Amsterdam, dating back to 1624. I had a good cider here.
Also saw the Rembrandt house which had a tour where he lived.

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Moco Museum // Museumplein

The Museumplein is a public area with a large yard where the popular museums are. Much like the Nelson-Atkins if it wasn’t fenced off and had other museums around. I saw (the outside of) Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh museum. I didn’t have tickets and wasn’t particularly interested as I’m not really an old art museum fan. 

I knew there was ice skating in front of Rijksmuseum and wanted to check that out. Definitely not how the online pictures portrayed it though. Smaller than Crown Center in KC and had water on the surface. With a sprained wrist and it being 40 degrees I wasn’t interested in falling on that. 

Between the two museums is a newer, modern art museum called Moco. My airbnb host actually mentioned that it’s been a hit for people but I didn’t look into until walking by I saw a familiar piece of artwork in a glass case outside. I then discovered this museum had REAL BANKSY artwork inside and bought tickets right away. They had quite a few original Banksy pieces and you could listen to audio snippets on your phone through a link to their website about particular pieces to give more information. Cool set up. The museum had other artists too, the name Warhol caught my attention since Gruder made me a fan years ago. There was another artist who made pieces which looked like balloons, but weren’t. Really cool work. 

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Light festival / Canal boat tour

Made my way to Pier 5 for my canal tour. I bought tickets to see the Light Festival which is a series of light art installations along and in the canal. It was not as cool as I thought it would be. I actually gave the tour company a bad review online because I didn’t appreciate the guide saying things in dutch first, then passing the structure and saying it in English so by the time I could understand it I wasn’t even looking at the piece, as well as 90% of the boat was quiet during the Dutch portion and then was disrespectfully loud during the English portion so it made for a poor experience. Some of installations were decent but would not pay for this again. You can also see all them from the street of the canal so it’s possible to do it on a bike tour, but of course this was easier, warmer and true to the area riding along the canals.

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Zaanse Schans

I didn’t have a good plan on how to experience this part of The Netherlands but had read about it several places so I figured it was a must do considering I should see some real windmills. A long bus ride out resulted in a pretty sub-par experience. Its a small area with a museum (which of course I didn’t do) and several buildings with different things like clog making, cheese making, petting zoo area, and the like.

I was hoping to see a demonstration of the clog making, its actually the main reason I wanted to visit this area, but nothing was happening so I got my tiny souvenir, took some photos for Cara Jordan and went to the next stop. The cheese building reminded me a lot of Osceola Cheese back home so I enjoyed several tiny sample pieces. I walked around the windmills but they weren’t open for tours no had any information on what they did or provided to the area. Was truly let down with this whole experience.

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Anne Frank huis

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Where to start. I’m going to give crazy detail during this portion because I know some people who want it all so if you’re not interested then at least you read everything else first. Why else does anyone go to Amsterdam if not to go to the Anne Frank home? (rhetorical question) So you should probably read this part if you’ve never been. Step by step of how this whole experience went:

Tickets could only be bought online and several days in advance. They have 15 minute increments when you can enter. This is deceiving on the ticket which reads 12:45-13:00 and you think how could this only be 15 minutes? It’s not. I took a FULL TWO HOURS inside, and that’s with me totally not being a museum person. Dad would be so proud of me that I stopped to read every single English word. You aren’t supposed to take photos inside the museum so I only snapped a couple quick ones when nobody else was close by. Otherwise I’d have video taped the whole thing of course. Need to get some spy glasses or a broach. 

Entrance to the museum is a waiting area for the people allowed in during that 15 minute slot where you turn in your coats and bags and get an audio device. I can’t recall if you could plug headphones into it but I would recommend bringing a small set just in case you could have so you weren’t holding this thing smashed to your hear to hear it. You walk through and at first it seems very modern and I’m thinking, hold on I want to see the house not a museum. It comes.
Essentially looking at the photo below-if you add another building to the open side of this building thats where the museum starts. So you walk through this whole structure but you don’t go in the front door as depicted at the light pole. 

When you walk in the room your audio device connects to the a thing on the wall which starts playing information you learn about whatever is in that section which included information about things going on in the area as they prepared to move into the Annex, other Jews being taken from the city, you learn about the other members who lived in the Annex, schooling for Anne and her sister Margot, the other workers in the building who helped the annex members stay hidden and how they acquired ration cards for enough food, etc. The beginning gives information on Anne Frank and some general photos you see all the time. It starts going through her diary. You hear a young girls voice on the recorder which go along with words on the wall of excerpts from her diary as you progress through the timeline history of this period. Eventually you’re in the actual home. These rooms which do have stuff are filled with things they’ve staged. Its not the actual furniture since the building was emptied after they were found and Otto didn’t live there again.

You come up to a set of stairs on your right and can orient yourself behind the front door of the actual home and you work your way up and around each floor which contains Frank’s office, storage rooms of the herbs they grew there, etc. There is a sign in each room with a blueprint of the building and a red floor to show you where you are in the structure and where the annex starts. After you work your way up to the last floor before the annex you turn the corner, walk down the hall into another room and it’s all as you’d imagine. 

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The room with the bookcase. THE BOOKCASE. I absolutely could NOT believe it was THE bookcase. It’s in a glass case, pulled away from the wall, still filled with books and binders which were in it in in the 1940s. It was incredible to see. I know other people might have the same feeling about a piece of artwork or maybe a church, but this bookcase is what did me in. Wow. So you, like the members of the annex did, step through the hole in the wall behind the book case and enter the annex. You feel like you just walked through a time warp of history. I didn’t realize but its actually a large step up behind the book case but you also have to duck your head and you don’t immediately walk up the stairs. A metal bar, built in for the tour, guides you to the left and you tour the lower part of the annex. Walls have cases on them with cut outs of the actual wall paper which has things glued and taped to it. You learn about who lived in which areas of the annex. You walk around the back of the stairs (not that you can see it its just a wall like normal staircase structures) and then come around to behind the bookcase but now you have to go up the stairs. Have to.. *eye roll* This also was a huge wow moment. I let the people ahead of me go a ways so I wasn’t right on top of them going up the stairs which were very narrow steps and very steep. You come up to the top of the stairs where you tour the upper level. Here I recognized how quiet everyone was. During this portion the audio guide isn’t going. It stops before you enter behind the bookcase and then nobody (unless they’re awful humans) says a peep as you walk through the actual annex portion. Again you see cut outs from the walls which were there and notes from Anne’s diary about how she put up newspaper and magazine clippings to make the place feel better than just the wallpaper. You walk into the room which had the stairs, more like a ladder, up into the attic portion which Anne wrote about. The stair/ladder structure is THE original, also with glass around it. You can go up the stairs but the hole is still open into the attic and they have a couple mirrors in the attic slanted so you can look up and see what’s there-which is nothing but old walls holding so much history.

Writing this several days later I actually don’t remember leaving the annex and how we got back to the museum portion. It took you around to another modern museum layout which had a lot of old trinkets. Things like a marble set Anne gave to her young girl neighbor friend, a child toy ceramic tea set she gave away too, small original photos of her with her sister or friends, an original cloth Jewish star, books, Margot’s report card, notebooks showing Anne and Margot in the jewish school they started going to, post cards Otto sent to his sister, things I’ll never remember to list here but truly incredible they still have it all. Like I mentioned, since the annex was emptied by the Nazi’s after they were discovered, not many things remained there for us to enjoy today. All that remained from the other couple who lived in the annex was some sort of notebook paper and a grocery list from before they went into hiding. 

At various areas there are video interview snippets with Otto Frank, I didn’t even know he did interviews so it was really incredible we have this today. Anne’s actually diaries are on display. I didn’t remember this but she wrote in a diary and then rewrote it later in another journal so there is both the first and the second of those. She also had a book where she wrote short stories and copied portions of other books she enjoyed, those original books are also on display. I couldn’t believe it. You also learn about Otto after he was liberated. He put ads in newspapers to find his daughters, old clippings are on display of that. I also didn’t know this but he remarried to someone who had a daughter and it briefly describes their life. There was more information on the business workers who helped keep them hidden and what happened to them after the war. 

Then.. suddenly it’s over. There’s a bakery that sits above the main entrance and a store where you can buy books, post cards, posters, etc. Then you walk down the stairs to the other side of the counter where you turned in your belongings, and you walk out of the building. 

Unless you’re Lora Gustin or someone else completely enamored with this part of history and Anne Frank, I cant say 100% you have to travel to Amsterdam for this tour. If you’re going to do other things like Corrie ten Boom, Dachau, Auschwitz, Warsaw, etc., then yes absolutely come if you’re going to fly across the big pond; likewise if you life in Europe you might as well go see it. If I was back in the area for enough time I might do it again. So .. do it if you can, do it twice, but don’t come to Europe just for Anne Frank.

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More from the city

I had lunch at Magna Plaza, the Former Amsterdam Main Post Office, currently a shopping mall and food court. After asking some locals what else I needed to see I decided to wonder around the streets to take in more of the city but then it started pouring, even tiny pieces of ice covered the streets so I hid out in a book story and under a restaurant awning for a while before finding a place to have a glass of wine and French fries. Classy. The night finally came and I found a pasta place around the pier, had dinner and finished the night packing in my room, finishing off that bottle of wine. 

Sunday morning was a rough start for various reasons but I made myself find a breakfast place and eat before a long day of travel ahead. I found Moak pancakes which was really good. Several specialty pancakes of all sorts. Worth a visit.
I walked the streets a tad more and sat outside central station people watching until I needed to make my way to the airport to transition from personal trip to work trip. 

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Overall // Bikes // Coffee Shops

All in all I enjoyed the city. It was cold so I was always bundled up and it rained everyday so I kept my umbrella ready. I would go back here, which is something I haven’t said about many places, but would like to go with a travel partner, especially if I could stay with someone from Amsterdam to experience the good off the beaten path places and enjoy the coziness of the city. Really wishing I would have done a bike tour. I Bike Amsterdam was the top rated and recommended tour company but they were sold out the whole month of January when I started planning this trip. On the note of bicycles: everyone makes a big deal to watch out for bicycles in Amsterdam. Clearly as ‘The World’s Cycling Capital’ there are several bikes. It looks like a bike factory/museum outside several transportation places like train stations where more bikes are locked up in the racks than people in the area. If you have any degree of situational awareness and common sense you’ll realize you don’t walk in the red bike lane and always look both ways before crossing the street, then bikes are not an issue. I did have one instance where there was an insane intersection of people, bikes, and cars where I don’t know how some people survived or anyone knew when to go. 

Also of note if you don’t know, coffee shops do not sell coffee. Be sure to search for cafes, not coffee shops, at least if you’re trying to stay in the Marine Corps and only wanted some warm caffeine to start your day.