Semester Break Part 1: Amsterdam!!

Last week was my semester break, and I spent the vacation traveling with four friends to two beautiful cities: Amsterdam and Bruges! I've wanted to go to Amsterdam for as long as I can remember, especially after seeing pictures/hearing stories from family and friends who have visited in recent years. I was even more excited after reading a WONDERFUL book that is partly set in Amsterdam just a few weeks ago! So, backpacks in hand, we flew from Vienna to Rotterdam, and then took to the train to Amsterdam to begin our adventure!

Our hostel was nicely centrally located, on the edge of the Red Light District, and just a few minutes form Dam Square, the main central square in the city. We spent our first day on a free 3-hour-long walking tour with the fabulous tour guide Kendra, who led us all over the city, sharing lots of history, fun facts, and great jokes! Some highlights of the tour included Dam Square (with the Royal Palace, New Church that is still hundreds of years old, and the National Monument), the New Market (a large square with a building that at one point held scales used by merchants, a public execution center, and the place people examined the bodies that had just been executed), the famous "I amsterdam" sign, alleys of the Red Light District, one of the narrowest houses in the city (since you had to pay taxes based on how wide your house was, lots of houses were built very narrow), old Dutch East India Company headquarters, many churches, and of course lots and lots and lots of canals and bridges. According to Kendra there are 1,281 bridges in the city! The canals were important back in the days when Amsterdam was a huge port city, and although it's not as prominent as it once was (Rotterdam is the biggest port in the Netherlands toady), the city still relies heavily on its importing/exporting business and the canals continue to be used for both business and tourism. 

A few fun facts I learned on the tour:

• Since the buildings in Amsterdam are so tall and narrow the staircases are very steep. Amsterdam was a city of merchants, but none of them wanted to carry their goods to the top of their homes using those awful stairs, so they built these hooks on the top of the houses, and then threaded a rope through the hook to pulley their goods up to the top through a window. However they didn't want the rope to swing and break their windows on the way up, so many of the houses are built on a bit of an angle--they kind of lean outwards, so that if the rope swings, it swings parallel to the fae of the house, rather than perpendicular, and therefore the windows don't break! You can see the hooks on some pictures below!
• The city is basically artificially created so the foundation of lots of the houses is pretty weak. Therefore lots of houses are falling down/leaning against their neighbors for support. That seems safe.
• The Queen of the Netherlands is stepping down this year, so the very last Queen's day will happen on April 30. Her son will take over, and apparently he's known as Prince Pils because he liked his beer when he was in school...sounds like every other monarch ever.
• When Louis Bonaparte was crowned King of the Netherlands by his bro Napoleon, he tried to speak to the people in Dutch but only learned one phrase, "I am your king." He then pulled a JFK-like move and accidentally said "I am your rabbit." Thus he is called the Rabbit King.
• Red Light ladies usually charge 50 Euros for 15 minutes...in case you were wondering.
• Prostitutes in the Netherlands are registered in the Chamber of Commerce as "self-employed" and they have healthcare, biweekly check-ups, and they are unionized.
• Catholicism was outlawed in the Netherlands for several hundred years so there are a lot of underground Catholic churches (some literally underground, some hidden in attics or back rooms of people's houses)
• Dutch people are uncharacteristically tall.

You can see the hooks on those beams
sticking out of the tops of the buildings

Royal Palace

New Market--Rembrant painted the Anatomy Lesson
in this building, which kick-started his portrait career 

Old VOC (Dutch E. India Trading Company) headquarters

Dam Square

One of the narrowest houses in the city

The crown on the top of the steeple in the back was given to
Amsterdam by Maximillian I (Hapsburg!) because he was thankful
to the Dutch for something...I can't remember what

so many bikes everywhere

We spent most of our time wandering around the city, dodging bi-polar weather, eating wonderful food, enjoying the beautiful buildings, and getting lost amongst hundreds of identical canals. Many of the canals are home to houseboats, some more beautiful than others.

One of the highlights of our time in Amsterdam was a visit to the Reypenaer Cheese Shop, where we did a wine and cheese tasting! We sampled 6 different cheeses, paired properly with the appropriate wine. We learned, among other things, that Gouda is not the name of a cheese, but rather the name of the shape of the cheese. So you can have many different cheeses, with very different tastes, but they are all called Gouda! All the cheeses we tasted were goudas: 2 made from goats milk, and 2 from cows milk. We had this little "cheese guillotine" to slice the cheese, and a handy little worksheet where we could record the color, smell, taste, texture, age, and other notes on each cheese. At the end we got a certificate proving that we are all "Expert Cheese Tasters," a fact that we of course are all putting on our resumes right away. The girl running the tasting was adorable and hilarious and we all felt super classy and had so much fun with the whole thing. We had free reign on how much of each kind we wanted to eat or sample, so needless to say that in the period of that hour we ate a LOT of cheese. It was magical.

We also visited a few different museums. The Anne Frank House is an absolute-must for any visitor to Amsterdam. It was beautifully-done and made me realize that I definitely do not know nearly as much about Anne Frank as I thought I did. The museum is housed in the office building that she and her family hid in from 1942-1945. The building was Otto Frank's office, and some of the people who worked for him helped hide the family during those years, at huge risk to their own lives. I was really struck by how large the area they hid in was. I had a vision in my mind of a little attic, in which all 8 people were stuffed together for years, but there were actually separate rooms, a small kitchen, bathroom, and two different levels. Now, it wasn't a mansion, and they had to stay completely silent inside that area with no windows or anything for so long, so it was by no means comfortable, but it was rather impressive how well-equipped this hiding place was. Once Anne's father heard about the things happening to Jewish families throughout Europe, he started plans for this secret annex in his office building (this was around 1940). They built it little by little and by the time the family had to move in, after Anne's sister was called to a German work-camp in 1942, the whole place was ready. I was amazed at how such a large area went completely unnoticed by the Nazis, who were known for such meticulous record-keeping. Walking through the exhibit and then actual rooms themselves was of course incredibly emotional, especially when we got to the end and learned about Anne's father's mission to make Anne's writing known to the world. Anne had written all about how her dream was to be a journalist and write novels (she wanted to publish her diary after the war, and had even started writing a novel). Once Otto came back as the only survivor from the group of 8 in hiding, and found the diary, he worked tirelessly to make his daughter's dream come true. It's crazy trying to imagine how difficult it must have been for the father to read everything Anne wrote, even the teenagery "I'm angry at my parents for such and such" kinds of things.

This story was certainly remarkable and inspiring, and becomes even more so when you think about the fact that the Franks were by no means the only Jews to go into hiding during this time. In fact, hundreds  of Dutch people went underground after the German invasion. Perhaps the most memorable part of the exhibit for me was a picture of Anne's school class from before the war--there were about 30 students, half of whom were Jewish. The picture had numbers next to the faces of the Jewish students that corresponded to a placard that told the student's name and what happened to them. Many went into hiding, some were found, and a total of 9 died. I was really struck by two students, both half-Jewish, one with a Jewish mother and one with a Jewish father. The one with the Jewish father was not listed as Jewish, so he was spared, but the other had a Jewish mother so he was taken and killed. That was a crazy crazy time.

Of course I wasn't able to take pictures or anything and I learned a whole lot more about this period of history so if you're interested, the Anne Frank House website has a ton of info!

Another favorite site was the Portuguese Synagogue, built in 1675 and still in use today! Somehow it was miraculously spared from destruction during the second world war, and it now includes a museum that houses lots of old manuscripts, textiles, and other cool stuff from throughout Jewish history. Fun fact: during the Spanish inquisition, many Jews came to the Netherlands, where they were welcomed because they had lots of money and mercantile connections. However the Netherlands were at war with Spain at the time, so they called themselves Portuguese! History is fascinating!

Outside of the synagogue 

Manuscript collection with lots of super old Torah scrolls

Silver Repository

On our last day we visited the Dutch Resistance Museum, a super fascinating and informative museum about the way the Dutch people responded to the German invasion. There was this incredibly vast network of Dutch underground resistance operations, including church groups, student organizations, publishers, government officials, laborers, and tons of other people. There were mass strikes, violent sabotages, and lots of other crazy stuff. I knew pretty much nothing about anything covered in the exhibit so I learned a whole lot and found everything to be really interesting. 

The rest of our time was spent, as I said, wandering the different neighborhoods, window-shopping, sampling the food, and taking in all the energy the city had to offer! 

A brewery in a windmill?? Sold. 

Most delicious apple pie ever!

Rainbow on our last day!

This blog post is super disorganized and long...so sorry about that. Amsterdam is beautiful and historic and has a kind of energy you don't see in many other places. No matter what time it was, the city was moving. I really enjoyed our time there, and almost wish I had gotten to spend more time exploring everything the city has to offer, because I feel like we only just scratched the surface! I can't wait to go back!!!

From Amsterdam we took a bus to Bruges, a city of completely different character, with it's own blog post coming soon!