The trip started off not-so-well, as approximately 30 other people and I missed our connecting train to Amsterdam in Düsseldorf – as we pulled into the train station in Düsseldorf, we saw our next train across the platform and all got ready to sprint the 15 meters it would take to get us across the platform. And then we watched as our train came to a full stop, and the new one started to pull away.
A really slow DB worker, a new ticket, three more (slow!) trains, another really tight connection, and four hours later I arrived in Amsterdam, sadly two full hours later than I was supposed to. Such is life. Happily the weekend only got better after that.
Amsterdam is freaking beautiful. I absolutely love the canals and the buildings all packed really close together – it’s beautiful really early in the morning, it’s beautiful during the day, and it’s even more beautiful at night, when street lamps lining the canals illuminate the water. I also loved how after every five minutes of walking in a new direction the city had a slightly different vibe – sometimes it was unlike anything I’d every seen, sometimes it had a slightly German-Altstadt feel, sometimes it was purely sketch (aka Red Light District) and sometimes it kinda reminded us of Cleveland! I loved the variety.
One of my favorite things about the canals were all the boats lining the canal…banks? They are all super old and run down! I loved the contrast between the old, beautiful, wealthy looking buildings and the total crap boats that were still adorable – they definitely intensified the whole canal feeling. I was also really amused by the fact that some boats were clearly just poor, de-masted sailboats that looked pretty funny and awkward.
On the red-light-district: Chris’s guidebook said something along the lines of “Amsterdam might box your Puritan ears with it’s free-expression-ness,” and it was totally right. My ears were quite painfully boxed, and I was not a fan of the prostitutes in windows and sex shops and crass, graphic advertising all over. Not my scene (shocking, right?).
Although my favorite part of the weekend honestly might have been all the time we just spend walking and watching, we also got a healthy dose of touristy-activities:
· Van Gogh Museum – not my fave art museum ever, but enjoyable for 2 hours
· Heineken Brewery Tour – awesome. Completely hysterical, cheesy, only in English, and concluded with some free (well, aside from the part where admission was 15 Euro) beer at the end. I would totally recommend it, it was a really light few hours between art and…
· The Anne Frank House – an incredibly strange experience. First, I never realized that that Otto Frank’s business and the Secret Annex were literally smack in the middle of the city. The location truly astounded me; it didn’t seem secret at all as we were just a 10 minute walk from Amsterdam’s main square on one of Amsterdam’s main canals. In a way, that really intensified the sadness associated with the Franks story – they smack in the middle of a huge, beautiful city and unable to access any of it. Secondly, I was really weirded out by the experience of walking through the Secret Annex – you go through the former business-rooms and read the exhibits, and suddenly you’re through the bookcase-door and up some really steep stairs and bam, in the Annex, and you go through each room, and then suddenly you’re done and keep going through a museum built into the adjacent buildings. On the train home I couldn’t put my finger on what had been so weird, but realized Monday that it’s the way everyone just snakes through each room in a line, spending less than 60 seconds in each bare room (Otto wanted the rooms left unfurnished). The extremely quick little trip through the rooms is, I imagine, the anti-thesis of what the Franks lived through for over two years – not that any amount of well-though-out museum curation or innovative presentation could in any way replicate what they lived through. I feel though that my framework for understanding Anne’s diary has been distorted or altered in some way, in that today, in a free Amsterdam in the year 2011, we just were able to just walk hurriedly and freely through what was her home in an occupied, 1940s Holland.
· Canal-boat-tour – definitely my favorite touristy activity, even though I thought it would be kind of silly! It wasn’t at all – it’s a completely different view of the city when you’re on the canal, and I learned awesome random stuff. For example, all of the houses along the canals have furniture hooks built into the gables/roofs/whatever they are, because the staircases are too tight for any furniture to be taken in through doors – it gets hoisted up outside of the building and sent in through the windows. We also learned that approximately one car per week falls/accidentally drives into the canals. Ridiculous.
Add to that lots of walking, coffee, eating, and a decent amount of sleep, and that was our weekend!
Final note: languages. I heard wayyy more English/Spanish/Italian than Dutch all weekend, I’m pretty sure. But, it was cool to see how Dutch really is similar to English and German – when I saw, for example, street signs in both Dutch and English, the Dutch was usually decently intelligible with my knowledge of German. And on the boat tour, when the info was presented first in Dutch, then German, then English, it was fun to see how much I could get just from listening to the Dutch first.
Perhaps later this week I will update on my real life here in Germany…
Until then, some proof that I was there:
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