I have been to Amsterdam numerous times since being here, not just to go out but to see some sights as well! My first stop was the Anne Frank house, which is a museum in the house where Anne Frank and her family hid for two years during WWII before they were ratted out and shipped away to Nazi concentration camps. I read the book years ago and didn’t really remember the story, but I was reminded during my visit. The most interesting part of the museum was that you are able to actually walk through the rooms in which Anne, her family, another couple and two men lived in during those two years. These six rooms are called “The Annex” and are hidden at the top of the four story house (the bottom two floors housed Anne’s father’s business), the only entry being sealed by a faux bookcase. For two years, these eight people lived in the equivalent of two studio apartments and could never go outside. They could not enjoy sunlight, either, because the windows had to be blacked out to make sure no one from the outside saw them. During the day, they had to be extremely quiet and use as little plumbing as possible to ensure the people working in the business below did not know there were people living upstairs. Only about three of the people in the business knew of the hide-aways and they provided them with food and supplies. The Annex was dark and cold and I could not imagine living in a space that small for two years. One thing I remember from the book was that Anne cut pictures out of magazines and pasted them on her walls—many of those pictures are still on the walls of her room. That was the post touching part of the museum in my opinion, because you could really tell that people actually lived there (all furniture was removed after the family was discovered and per request of Anne’s family, it has not been replaced so the rooms are empty). It was never discovered who ratted the family out to authorities, and Anne’s father was the only member of the party who survived the concentration camps.
Another day I headed to the Van Gogh Museum. The museum was clean and modern, and housed a floor of Van Gogh’s work, a floor housing works of artists/movements that inspired him and a floor of works of artists that were inspired by Van Gogh. I expected Van Gogh’s work to be larger, but many were smaller canvasses that you had to get relatively close to in order to see. The most famous painting in the museum was that of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, and I was wondering where Starry Night is housed since that is really Van Gogh’s most famous painting. During one point of his life, Van Gogh was inspired by Oriental art and my favorite painting in the museum was of a cherry blossom tree with a bright blue background which he painted for his nephew and was hung in the nephew’s bedroom.
After the Van Gogh museum we walked over to the Bloomenmarkt, a famous floating flower market. One of my favorite things in the world (other than libraries) is fresh flowers, and due to the fact the Netherlands is a huge exporter of flowers, they are super cheap here. I get tulips every week at the local market in Leiden, and enough to fill a vase (sometimes two vases) is only €5. The Bloomenmarkt is considered “floating” because it is housed in stalls on numerous small barges that sit on a canal. To the regular eye, the barges just look like numerous garden shops sitting side by side as they don’t move and seem like permanent structures. I was actually kind of disappointed by the market, probably because we went on a cold (yet rarely sunny) day. Half the stalls were closed, and the other half were closed off to keep the flowers out of the cold. Instead of walking along and being able to see all the flowers out in the open, you had to actually enter each stall to see the flowers. I definitely need to come back to Holland in the summer, because I oftentimes find myself thinking/saying, “This would be so much better in the summer.”
Picture: Me, Molly and Anne Frank
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