Weekend in Amsterdam

I like Amsterdam, and it's not for that reason. I like the canals, I like the biking, I like the amazing English that the Dutch speak, I like looking like the people around me (so different from France!) and I like the relaxed culture. And I love the architecture:







The Anne Frank House (amazing museum, a must-do):

This place is amazing, not just to see historically but to feel and be in the actual place where people hid for over two years... it was going to be torn down and then American tourists, after having read Anne's diary and coming to Amsterdam and asking her father to see the house, gave Anne's father (the only surviving member of the Frank family) the idea to raise the money to buy the building and turn it into a museum/memorial. Amazing, powerful, haunting, beautiful.



See the house with the hook?

See the house with the hook?

So the houses in Holland have hooks because the stairs are too narrow to move furniture in and out of homes, so they put a rope on the hook and hoist up the furniture through windows. Brilliant! Most houses in Flanders (Dutch Belgium) and Holland have hooks like this. There is a certain row of houses in Amsterdam right on the canal called the "Dancing Houses," and they "dance" because the ground is, shall we say a bit unstable and they wiggle a bit. When folks use the hooks to move furniture in and out of these houses, well, you can imagine that the houses move a bit more...


This is the Westerkerk in Amsterdam (right next to the Anne Frank house) and it's important to my family history! Centuries ago (1632 to be precise), my great-great-great (x8 or 9 or 10) grandparents on my paternal grandmother's side got married here before taking the across the Atlantic to America. During the crossing they lived through some horrible storm and, upon arrival they had a child they named "Storm." Cool, huh? Anyway, it's the only European church I've been denied entry to because it was not "open to tourists," which is sad and a bit ironic, but at least I got to see the outside.


Okay, I fell for it, I took the ultimate touristy picture:


One last comment: While I was sad not to get to visit the Rijksmuseum (most of it is currently closed for renovation), I LOVED the Van Gogh (Fon HHHHoHHHHHH in Dutch) museum, even if it was 14 euros. Worth the line and the money. I really like museums dedicated to one artist, you learn so much more about his/her own life, formation and art. Van Gogh was mostly self-taught and only painted for 10 years!