It was snowing when we landed at Schipohl in Amsterdam yesterday. It was also freezing cold and dark. One of the first things we saw was a large display of cheeses. Then we found an ATM and became instant fast friends with a slight, pleasant man who was traveling with his family of six. He seemed to think I knew what I was doing so he asked me how I thought he should get his family of six into town. I told him to take a taxi. We ran into him again in the taxi line, and then our taxi passed his somewhere along the outer canals.
We are staying at the Hotel Pulitzer which is a fabulous, five star hotel composed of 26 different canal houses all joined together. It covers a whole "block" between two canals. Inside it's a labyrinth of hallways and half stairways and wood paneled sitting rooms and sudden garden courtyards. Each canal house is on a slightly different level from the next so when you pass from one to another you have to go up or down a few steps. Our room is on the fourth floor of the canal house just to the left of the main entrance. We look out over the same canal that Anne Frank's house is on. We also look out over our hotel's dock, which has an old wooden restored canal boat that Winston Churchill once rode around in.
Anne Frank's house is only two blocks away. In between us and it is the huge medieval Westerkerke. We walked down past it in the snow and got to the Frank house just when it was opening.
I remember visiting the Anne Frank house when I was about 9 years old. Back then, you walked right in the front door and walked up the tiny stairs and back into the annex. Now there is a whole huge new very modern museum next to it where you enter. It has a big book store and a cafe and is light and airy. Which makes the Secret Annex when you get back up into it seem even darker and more cramped then I remember (I'm also bigger now). Now they have videos of Otto Frank (the only one of the 8 people hiding in the house who survived the war) talking about how he felt when he found his daughter's diary after coming back from Auschwitz. They also have real black-out curtains up on the windows now which makes the Annex just awful during the day. It's amazing they hid in there for 2 years.
I had also forgotten how narrow and steep the staircases are. They are so steep you have to walk up them sideways -- otherwise your knees get in the way.
When we left we heard the Westerkerke churchbells ringing.
This morning we slept in and when the sky brightened (would be an exaggeration to say that the sun rose) we saw the thin North Sea light above the canals and listened to the seagulls and to the Westerkerke bells ringing. I realized these were the exact same bells that Anne Frank could hear from the Annex. That was a strange feeling.
Once we got going we took a canal boat tour, walked through the flower market and the University of Amsterdam, and ended up having a wonderful dinner of some kind of fish called a brill at a little restaurant near the Rijksmuseum called the Brasserie de Keyzer. The bartender at the hotel told us to go there and it was truly a Dutch local hang out and the food was amazing. We have discovered that Dutch coffee is amazing. Better than anything either of us have ever had before. Which is convenient considering how watery and damp this town is.
On the boat tour we learned that an average of one car a week drives into a canal by accident. We also learned that the reason every canal house has a "furniture hook" on its gable is that the only way to get furniture into a canal house is through the windows because as mentioned above, the stairs are too steep. And we learned that the houses are built on wood piles because the ground is so soft. We observed to each other that wood rots, which explains why so many of the older houses lean at such crazy angles. Some lean so much the curtains don't hang straight in the windows.
Speaking of windows, we decided the best way to become rich in Amsterdam would be to go into the window treatment business. The canal houses have almost nothing but windows in the front, and the windows are huge -- much bigger than I've seen anywhere else in the world. The ground floors have maybe 20 foot ceilings and the windows are almost floor to ceiling. We realized that if you didn't do that, the feeble North Sea light would hardly make a dent and you wouldn't be able to see anything inside.
But possibly the neatest thing we did today was go to the Old Dutch Riding School, which modeled on the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. There is an indoor arena with chandeliers and marble horse heads. The mommies of the students in class sit up on a balcony with a waitress who brings them Dutch coffee and whatever else they want (crepes, etc.). There are several aisles of school horses and then boarder horses and we walked all around and watched some lessons. Apparently the City tried to tear the school down in the 1980s and the populace rallied to save it. The horses were all beautiful and fat and glossy and very well behaved.
Tomorrow morning we fly to Nairobi.
posted by Anonymous @ 9:17 AM
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