Think of all the beauty...

Instead of the quick hour-long nap I intended, I wound up sleeping for three and a half hours, so I decided to do the Rijksmuseum the next day and walked over to the Jordaan, which is a funky little neighbourhood near the Anne Frank Huis. I spent the first part of my walk learning how not to get run over by cyclists.

Here's the thing: there are no stop signs in downtown Amsterdam. A few major intersections have lights, but mostly you count on common sense to
get you through. Here's the other thing: the cyclists are like kamikaze pilots. They barrel through intersections and around corners at top speed. They also have dedicated lanes which sometimes meld right into the sidewalk and they don't suffer fools (or clueless tourists) gladly. Oh, and mopeds are allowed in those lanes.

Fortunately, "Sorry" sounds the same in Dutch as in English. Ask me how I know.

From Amsterdam 2010

After wandering around and getting lost a few times, which is a great way to see a neighbourhood in my opinion, I got in line to see the place where Anne Frank and her family hid for two years.

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy. -- Anne Frank

First piece of advice about the Anne Frank Huis: get your ticket online. You get to by-pass the lineup. I didn't because I didn't want to be tied down my first day, but that was okay because I followed the second piece of advice: go in the evening. When we passed the house in the middle of the day during the canal tour, the line was around the corner and down the block. I went at about 7 pm and had to wait maybe 25 minutes only because a student group had booked tickets at the same time.

From Amsterdam 2010

This was the one thing I really wanted to see in Amsterdam, and it was worth the wait. When I first read the book, I was about the same age as Anne when she went into hiding and I remember identifying with her struggles to be taken seriously and treated as a near-adult, but at the same time she was going through something I couldn't even imagine. Walking through the rooms brought me a little bit closer to understanding what it was like.

The museum is really beautifully set up. They take you through the Frank's early life, the set up in the front office, the history. There's a model of the secret annex with furniture. You really get a sense of what it was like. Throughout, there are quotes from Anne's diary.

The girls used to take baths in one of the offices on weekends, and the room has black-out curtains. Anne's quote about peeping out while Margot was taking her turn was on the wall, so I peeped out, too. I got a bit of a shock when I saw how close the Westerkerk tower was, and I remembered something about how she was comforted by the sound of the bells. (It would be lovely if at this point I could say I actually heard them ringing during my tour, but it was not to be.)

The museum really establishes a sense of time and place. Once you are ready, you go through the open bookcase-door, hop up a steep step, and you're in the secret annex.

The first thing that struck me was how dark and cramped it was. Eight people lived in these four small rooms for two years. The rooms are empty, the way it was after the Nazis took all the furniture, but furnished they would be even smaller. The room Anne shared with her sister and later Dussel is about the width of my hotel room but not as long. They have the black-out curtains lowered and there are only dim bulbs in each room; the resulting dimness is what they lived with all the time. I can understand why Anne escaped to the attic when she could.

The empty rooms are poignant. Anne's pictures of royalty and film stars are up on the wall, as well as a growth chart and Otto Frank's pin map marking the Allied advance. You climb a staircase that's more ladder than anything to the larger room that was the common area. Peter's tiny room has a shadow box with the board of a boardgame he received as a birthday present.

The wc is pretty awful, except for a beautiful toilet bowl. Seriously. It's like Delft-ware. It was unexpected.

The secret annex didn't take long to go through, but it left an impact on me. I have a picture of the layout for the play, and naturally it's a lot bigger. I think that is the image I had of their hiding place. Seeing the real annex gave me a new perspective on Anne and her family's situation. Living in the dimness, in cramped quarters, under constant threat of discovery, with not much food, added to the usual tensions between housemates...

After the annex, you pass through to the next building where you learn of the hiders' fates and how the diary came to be published. The actual diary wasn't on display while I was there because they're renovating the room.  They have a video interview of Anne's friend who saw her in Bergen-Belsen before she died.  There's not a lot of 'stuff,' but that was fine with me; emotion, rather than objects, was on display.

Once out into the early evening sunshine, I wandered around in a bit of a daze. I realized I hadn't called to let Aged P know that I had landed safely (I didn't think she'd appreciate being woken at 2 AM her time) so I left her a rather emotional message. Then I managed to shake it off and went to find some place to eat.

There are lots of little restaurants in the Jordaan. I found a nice pub where they kept speaking to me in Dutch when they served me and where I got to admire some far-too-young but quite attractive Dutch men. Side note: did they pass a law wherein all unattractive Dutch males must remain indoors? I swear they are all good-looking.  Must be all the cycling.

I was thinking of finding some place to listen to music afterwards, but the jet-lag seriously caught up with me, so I wandered around, trying to find a stop for my tram. By some miracle, one of the trams on my line was being diverted to a place right near where I was, so I hopped on and went back to the hotel.

From Amsterdam 2010

Thus endeth the first day.  Man, that bed was small, but comfortable.