Wednesday October 7 to Saturday October 10 - Amsterdam

The people on the train with me do not shut up and have been loudly talking in German with one another for hours! The cabin is like a trap and keeps the sound in, they are so loud and I have no idea what they could be talking about since they don’t know one another, but they get along famously. Fine for a while but after several hours of this I have had enough, let’s get to Amsterdam! And Shut up!

That was my train ride from Berlin, maybe I am just tired and I did come down with a head cold in Amsterdam so that could be part of it too. But the lady in the train car was coughing all the time too so it is possible I got it from her. Who knows but after I got to Amsterdam I decided I would take a cab to my hotel, which of all things was a Tesla. There are a lot of nice cabs in Amsterdam and this city must be one of Elan Musk’s best markets as there are more Tesla’s here than I have ever seen in one place. And the vast majority are taxi cabs. They also have Mercedes and Audi cabs here, all sorts of cars that would easily cost $80k or more in the U.S. I made a comment of it to my driver and he told me the country supplements the taxi cabs here and they want nice ones. The train system is the same in Europe. He is surprised when I tell him that this does not occur in the U.S.

View from the windows of my room

The other thing of note is the driver thought my Amsterdam hotel was a sex house when we arrived. I think because he was interested in a new place, Amsterdam is going to be interesting.

For clarification, my hotel was not a sex house, just a four unit condo building that is more like a B&B, but the owner does not live there. Totally cool place I found on Trip Advisor called House of Amstel that overlooks the Amstel Canal on the border of the Red Light District. I would stay there again but the stairs are narrow and steep so returning home after a night of parting and the possibility you will literally kill yourself on the stairs is high.

They vacuum the streets here

There are a lot of strange people in this city, most of them guys in their 20’s, and they tend to be acting stupid and giggling. Perhaps thinking this is a sign that I have gotten old but the smell of pot wafts out into the streets and I find it somewhat ironic that you can’t smoke a cigarette inside here but Amsterdam has an entire economy about smoking joints in “coffee houses.” I think back to what my roommate in Peru, Ian, told me. “All the best pot in Amsterdam comes from Switzerland.” Don’t ask me why that is relevant but I figured he would get a kick out of me mentioning it.

 

The other thing I notice here is that people are very horny in Amsterdam and I have seen more kissing and feeling up than anywhere else I have been, noticeably so. I mean I am not stupid, I know Amsterdam has that reputation but good God, get a room. I even saw it some in the Anne Frank house. Another sign that I am old, nobody seems much interested in feeling me up.

The line outside of the Anne Frank house stretched around the corner and down to the house.

The line must be good for business because the church near the house literally has two gift shops built into it

Other than walk around I really did not do that much in Amsterdam. I did go to the Anne Frank house, as mentioned, and knew I needed to get their early so I decided to go over first thing when they opened. Good thing because I got there at 9:10, right after they started letting people in and the line was already an hour long and around the corner from the entrance on Pinsengracht Street. I thought about not doing it but I am glad I did as I would not have gone another time. Aside from the one bout of kissing mentioned earlier, the house is a rather somber affair. They tell the story of 13-year-old Anne Frank, her father Otto, mother Edith, sister 16-year-old Margot, the van Pels family Hermann, Auguste and their 16-year-old son Peter, and Otto Frank’s friend Fritz Pfeffer who hid in the back of the house for two years before the Nazi’s found them in 1944 and sent them all off to concentration camps. Of the four members of the Frank family and the other people hiding with them, all perished but the father, Otto. The diaries were saved by one of the work associates of Otto, who were helping them hide and eventually given to Otto after the war, who worked for several years to get them published.

Anne Frank

Photos are off the internet as photography is not allowed inside the museum and house.

 

Anne Frank house

Bookcase that hid the stairs to the upper rooms

Floor plan of the hiding place

The house is dark and stifling and you can only imagine what it must have been like, eight people living in a few small rooms with the shades drawn for two full years, hoping nobody would find you. In many ways the oppressive heat and stuffiness of the place is just as appropriate a part of the exhibit as showing the original diary in her handwriting, photographs, rooms and video documents of what happened. It is quite well done and other than the stifling feel of the place, perhaps the most memorable part of the entire exhibit is at the end they have opaque faces of everyone on a clear panels with images of the death camps behind them. It has been 60 years but that is not all that long when you start to think about it.

Amsterdam's bike parking garage next to the main train station

I went on a canal boat tour too but other than that, most of what I did in Amsterdam was walk around and see the city. The canals are a blackish water that ring the central city like horse shoes and it can be confusing to find your way around as the canals and narrow streets go off in every direction out from the center. I have a bad sense of direction anyway and it is even harder here without landmarks and an organization to how the city is laid out. I had a tourist map but not everything was on it so it did not always help.

Black bikes of Amsterdam, some of these things have been chained up for a long time, years in some cases

Everything is old here. The buildings in the original part were mostly constructed in the 1600s or 1700s, the canal boats are mostly all around 100 years old or older, even the bikes look old like they are all from the 1970’s. Of all the places I have been, including Dubrovnik, Amsterdam feels the oldest.

 

 

I only spend two nights in central Amsterdam and move out to a Marriott by the airport the last day so I can catch an early morning flight and it freaked me out a bit. The Marriott is essentially a business hotel with a conference center and everybody there were business execs. I had to wait an hour after checking in to take the shuttle back and got totally fidgety by all the business people having their business conference and eating their €22 lunch buffet, which like twice what you pay anywhere else for worse food. Let’s just say I was not liking the glimpse of a life I was getting ready to return to in the morning and going back to the U.S. and reality is going to be the last culture shock I need to deal with.

Some of the canal house boats that people live on, there are thousands in Amsterdam

So for my last few hours of freedom in my alternate reality I took my boat tour, walked around and enjoyed a few micro brews at a place called In de Wildeman and mourned the end of my trip some. I thought a little about where I was a year ago, where I might be a year from now, and mostly just sat there enjoying the last little bit of my trip.

In de Wildeman

As the sun was getting ready to go down I walked back over to the train station, hopped the train back out to the airport and watched the old part of Amsterdam receded as the train pulled out and started taking me somewhere else other than just the airport.