Randomsterdam

So I am getting real worried about my return flight home this coming Thursday. It has been snowing pretty steadily in Amsterdam over the past few days and more accumulation is expected during the early part of this week. As it is, many flights around Europe have been cancelled because of snow in London, Paris, Germany, etc. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the weather holds up for an on-time flight back home for the first time in close to a year!

Geez, closing in on one year since I was last home. It has been a fun year “on the road” and Amsterdam, my current home away from home, has proven itself to be quite the comfortable quarters. Coming here immediately from Perth I thought that the enthusiasm of being in a heavily connected cluster would see me whipping around every weekend to London, Brussels, Luxembourg, and everywhere in between. But thanks to financial crises with the Euro that have made the dollar stronger and my handy dandy Museumkaart (one time payment of $60 giving you access to hundreds of museums in the city…a normal museum entrance costs anywhere between $10-$15) I have been quite cozy lounging around in Amsterdam on the weekends. I did take a weekend trip to Barcelona several weeks back, but other than that, Amsterdam is the place to be!

My weekdays have been plenty full of driving around the Dutch countryside from meeting to meeting, and weekend activities have largely focused on museum hopping by day and Belgian beer drinking at night! The only work-related plug I’ll make here is that all my driving around has made me straight nasty at stick-shift driving. Ha, truth is there is still that awkward jolt between first and second gear and I will occasionally stall when going in reverse uphill – only because the clutch in our car is uber sensitive in reverse. But other than that, I quite enjoy driving stick shift and would go so far as to say that when I do eventually buy my own car I will prefer to have it be stick shift.

Like any good fashioned Western European city Amsterdam has its plethora of museums. The Anne Frank house and the Van Gogh Museum are the typical heavy hitters, both of which I was fortunate to visit. I was intrigued with what I learned in my visits to both.

Regarding Van Gogh, I was surprised to learn that he only really painted for some 10 odd years. He dabbled in other careers (including a preacher) before deciding to become a full time artist only 10 or so years before his eventual death by suicide. On top of that, although hailed as a Dutch master, most of his painting career was in France, not the Netherlands.

The surprising takeaway point at the Anne Frank house was that the annex where her family live/hid during Nazi occupation was actually a lot larger than I expected. From purely a physical space perspective, the square footage was larger than what the historical accounts I had learned in school relayed. The annex as it exists today is empty, as was instructed by Onno Frank, Anne’s father, when he renovated the house into a museum and foundation upon return from Auschwitz. That alone speaks volumes. The man survived Auschwitz. So while the annex is empty of original furniture, the diary is still there as are numerous relics and re-creative videos depicting that dark chapter in history. Perhaps the most sobering lesson of all was to learn that the worker who smuggled food and supplies to the family while they were in hiding and who found Anne’s diary and gave it to her father when he returned from Auschwitz, only died last year. Learning that was a sobering reminder into how not-so-far removed we are from WWII.

Beyond those two famous museums, my off-the-beaten track favorites so far have been the Amsterdam History Museum (Historisch Museum) and the newly opened Hermitage Museum, an extension of the world famous gallery in St. Petersburg, Russia.

When not museum hopping, it doesn’t take a bipartisan task force study to discover that one of my favorite activities is aimlessly wandering around the streets with my backpack and camera, popping into cafes to read my book and drink either coffee, beer, or wine on my weekend afternoons. Amsterdam certainly lends itself well to that on several fronts: its easy tightly compact urban layout has a “maze effect” to it, always lulling you into wandering to just the next corner; the English fluency of everyone makes it easy to ask “who, what, where, when, and why” is going on; and it is actually a decently cheap city compared to the rest of Western Europe (don’t get me started about Australia) so why the heck not take breather with a quick drink?

Despite the recent snow, the weather has held up for the most part. I was honestly expecting colder weather considering I’m in northern Europe, right along the fringes of the chilly North Sea. But with the exception of a few numbing winds, the temperature has never been too unbearably cold. The snow, mixed with the urban layout of Amsterdam with people zipping around on their 1950s style bikes (yup, everyone still bikes around in the snow), the many tram lines, and the brownstone houses really make the city feel like one big snowglobe …or perhaps a life size version of a Christmas tree train set. It has that charming, idyllic effect in other words. As much as I like the Christmas and holiday setting here, I’m eager to get home! So again, keep your fingers crossed that the snow gods remain dormant at least until the weekend. I’m all for a white Christmas, just not a white travel day!

Christmas feeling in A'dam