Monday, November 23, 2015

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Amsterdam
Amsterdam has more than 5 million international visitors every year, but luckily we caught Amsterdam during the off-season. It's a beautiful city with perfect, but sinking buildings, as a result of the city being built on a swamp.  It is the most bike accessible city in the world, and you learn really quickly that the bikers own the city streets. The biker lane is not a place you want to be. Feisty bikers with bells speeding by you in all directions.
There are more than 1,200 bridges in the city.  You'd think that the famous Amsterdam picture is taken from one or two spots, but really, that is what the entire city looks like. Every street is equally as beautiful as the last. At night, we walked along the canals looking inside the beautiful homes lit up with families inside.  I liked Amsterdam because it felt less like a tourist city and more of a traveler's city. People's style in Amsterdam was impeccable.  It was an alive city, full of movement and youth.










Anne Frank
The Anne Frank house was where Anne Frank hid from Nazi persecution with her family and four other people in hidden rooms at the rear of a 17th-century canal house, known as the Secret Annex.  Anne wrote a diary while she was in hiding.  Her father, Otto, was the only one to survive the war.
I read Anne's diary in 6th grade.  It had little meaning to me and I found it to be boring to read about Anne's mundane daily activities. Freshman year of high school, I read it again.  Now, I had an understanding of the Holocaust, and the book disturbed me.  I felt like I couldn't empathize correctly.  It was so devastatingly sad, but it was un-relatable for someone like me, in a small town high school with little understanding how truly inhumane and disgusting the Holocaust was. It was too much to comprehend.
Now, it was much more real. First, I read how Otto moved the family from Germany to Amsterdam in an attempt to escape.  They watched the news until realizing that they were going to invade Amsterdam as well.  As a father, having to send your whole family into hiding for the safety of your lives.  Watching your children ask about the sunshine, complain of boredom, or watch the horrific news as the Germans got closer to your hiding place. Anne Frank, a child, wrote, "the English news says they are being gassed."

First you walked through the store and the storage rooms for Otto's business before getting to the Secret Annex.  When we took a step into the Secret Annex, you could feel the change in air.  It was colder, both physically and psychologically.  I couldn't imagine being in there longer than 30 minutes.  It felt old and secret and unimaginably depressing. Anne so frequently talked about missing fresh air, and walking through the cold, dark, stuffy hidden rooms made it only more real to understand the depressing seclusion she must have felt. 

Van Gogh
Van Gogh was a phenomenon.  His paintings were so unreal.  He found liberation in his art and his wild colors as do many people, but he was a slave to his insanity.  He was kind and knew he was struggling with the limits of his mind.  I listened to the letters he wrote to his brother referencing very casually, his fits, his fears, and his insanity in which he knew encroached upon him unexpectedly. It was so relatable.  To feel so close to his fears through the beauty of his art. 

Craft Beer Brewery
We went to the coolest Brewery I've ever been to.  The IPA was phenomenal and I will miss the delicious beer when I leave Europe. It was a perfect atmosphere and we laughed a lot as we felt a little tipsy after a day of walking, lack of food, and most likely dehydration, which doesn't sound as fun as it was. But that is such an accurate description of studying abroad.  You are always dehydrated, you never know when you will eat, you overwhelm yourself with lovely things and excite your mind with new aesthetics that make you forget all bodily needs.



Red Light District
It's interesting how Amsterdam's culture has formed around the legalization of prostitution.  It has become thoroughly commercial and has been capitalized in a way that creates an atmosphere of competition for traffic.  Without bringing in the politics that go along the legalization of prostitution (which I support), I hated seeing men choosing women off the streets like they were choosing a can of beer off of a shelf, laughing and prideful as if it wasn't a person they were going to use, but something trivial. It was a sad place for me. It sounds oppressive and I don't mean it that way because I don't ever want to condemn a lifestyle or a choice because there is no part of my reality that allows me to understand how and why, but for me, it was hard to think that perhaps a man I could be with in the future could potentially instill values in my children of women being trivial prizes. Perhaps our generation can get past that and make it not about that, but rather about freedom of choice, but it is difficult to say.


The tragedies in Paris happened while we were in Amsterdam. We watched as the breaking news came out.  Everyone in the place turned and watched the Television in awe. There is so much to be said, but this photo Amsterdam displaying the French flag meant more to me than any words or articles could ever meant at that time.



Amsterdam was beautiful.  Full of lessons, sad, beautiful, and enlightening.


No comments:

Post a Comment