April 26, 2019 – Amsterdam, Netherlands
We arrived at 8 am. It was in the 50s and rain was unlikely. We decided to wait until after 9 am as I was already in the online queue by 8:30 am to get tickets to the Anne Frank house.
450 people were ahead of me in the queue. The message I received under that said “if the number is over 200, there is no use waiting. If it is under 200, there is no guarantee tickets can be purchased”. How fun is this? The site refreshed every minute with a new number. I had the site open on my phone as a backup. The number waiting kept going down with every refresh. 400, 350, 300… finally I was connected to a calendar where I was to choose a date. It still was not 9 am and I knew no tickets would be available for today. To keep the page active I kept selecting today’s date and let the page refresh and tell me there were no tickets available. When 9 am arrived I used my phone to select a time. I got the spinning wheel of death. I tried on the computer and I was in. I was able to purchase tickets for 1:30 this afternoon. I would later learn how lucky we were. There were thousands of people on the streets and only 20 or so were let into the Anne Frank house every 30 minutes.
If you notice the buildings leaning you have a good eye. Homes were built on wooden piles in the old days and as the wood would rot, the houses began to lean. Some of the homes lean forward. We learned that this was done intentionally to allow items to be pull up by using a hook and rope from the gable and the items would not scrape against the front of the building.
Notice the forward lean?
We walked through part of the red light district. I was surprised that it was very tastefully done.
One of the most popular attractions was Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.
We finished our tour about 12:30 and found a place to have lunch. We spent about 45 minutes having lunch in this place and then walked over to the Anne Frank house. Crowds now were overwhelming.
The front of the building where Anne Frank went into hiding.
The bookcase that hid the entrance to the annex behind the building.
Terri going into the annex.
I really wasn’t supposed to be taking pictures but I did grab a few. Very dim lighting and the quality is not very good. Most of the rooms had a picture of what the room looked like back in the 1940s.
A dot map of Amsterdam showing the location of jews. 1 dot = 10 jews.
The tour of the house just reinforced the waste of humanity. The diaries that Anne kept were all located here and could be viewed in the glass cases they were in. Who knows what she would have accomplished if she was allowed to live?
We visited the Mauthausen Death Camp when we visited Austria some years back and this left us with the same feeling.
The visit took about an hour.
We went to visit a cheese store that was nearby and bought some great cheese.
Afterward we went to Tommy Paige clothing store. Tommy had some custom designed clothing based on images he had from men in the 1930s.
I bought a jacket, pants, and a tie. Next stop was Terra’s Shoes. Custom made shoes from Spain.
Saddle shoes completed the look. Terri bought some saddle shoe loafers. Next stop was a hat store.
I like it!
Our day ended at a quaint restaurant where we had a drink outside. We walked back to the ship at 6:30 and decided against going to the party at the Rembrandt Museum. We had a quick dinner in the Lido, watched a movie and went to bed. Probably another 10 mile day.
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