Recap of Amsterdam

I was only in Dublin for one night before I took another flight out to Amsterdam. I was meeting up with Jenny Kronick and Brad there. It was Brad’s last stop on his Eurotrip of six or so cities. It was great to see them. We stayed in a hostel called the Flying Pig, in a great location in the city. What can I say about Amsterdam? It is a crazy place, from the coffee shops to the Red Light district, where people of all ages feel free to do whatever they want.

I’m falling very behind on these blog posts, so I’ll just recap the major events. The Red Light district is a place quite unique to anything I’ve seen before. All along the street are glass windows where girls in lingerie sit and wait for someone to give them some business. It was interesting walking past, seeing different men quickly walk inside a booth, led to the back behind a curtain by the girl they just chose. It’s crazy that the place is government funded. The district also has other attractions such as live sex shows, peep shows at 2 euros for 2 minutes, and fast food restaurants.

In an utterly 360 degree contrast, we went to the quite sobering Anne Frank museum the next day. The museum is very well done, without much to read on the walls. It’s powerful because of how bare it is. We saw the bookshelf that covered the door to the hiding place, the very steep staircases, the bedrooms, the kitchen. In Anne’s bedroom some of her newspaper clippings were still glued to the walls. The annex was bigger than I expected. Of all the people hiding there, Otto Frank, her father, was the only one to survive. In a recorded interview with him taken when he was an old man playing at the end of the museum, he said that for the years they hid up in the annex, he and Anne maintained a very good relationship, yet he never knew what she wrote about in her diary. Naturally he was surprised when he read it for the first time, unaware that Anne had those kinds of thoughts and he concluded that no matter how good your relationship is with your child, you never really know who they are.

Later that day we rented bikes and rode around the city. We ended up going to another notable place: a “fluorescent light” museum that the walking tour guide told Jenny to see. This place was hilarious. It was run by a 54 year old man from Wisconsin very much still living in the 1970’s, wearing a flower vest and washed out jeans with a long grey beard, and his 74 year old French girlfriend. The museum is their house, the front room completely cluttered with art they are trying to sell, and the actual museum is the man’s basement: a small room filled with his rock collections and cave project he’s been working on for 20 years. 

He and his girlfriend travel all over the world finding rocks that light up under black light. He is a real expert with these types of rocks and phosphorescent paint. He says that the two of them will go to a location, say the Himalayas, and will take a black light and walk up mountain trails at 3 in the morning looking for rocks. It as all very strange but I enjoyed talking to him, as he is a part of a dying breed of committed hippies, and we left after an hour or so.

Later that day Jenny flew back to Edinburgh and Brad and I hopped a train to Utrecht to stay with my friend Jeremy Cohen for the night. We ordered pizzas and Brad fell asleep. I went with Jeremy to the campus bar and we hung out there for a while. I got to meet some of his friends, many of whom were freakishly tall. The next day I got on the train and headed toward the airport.