Amsterdam

Once we got to Amsterdam things calmed down a lot.  We stayed close to the middle of the city and could walk most places we wanted to go.  Our first stop was the canal street market.  Hundreds of stalls all selling flower bulbs.  Brandon was in heaven.  Sad part was we couldn't buy any of them!  You can only take bulbs back to america sept - jan.  

 A gouda shop.

 getting graham and his stroller into the gouda shop.  The cheese was awesome.  One day I had a big slice of gouda with a sour green apple for breakfast - then for lunch I went to a little market and got some honey sweetened camembert with cranberries and a fresh (still warm!) wheat baguette to eat it on - and then I had a capresse salad for dinner with fresh mozzarella - the kind of fresh that melts in your mouth and tastes kind of velvety soft.  Wow.  a little too much cheese for one day obviously - but holy cow it was good.  hmmm just thinking about it makes my mouth water.

 so many bikes.  I kept forgetting about the bike lanes and once I had crossed the street would slow down just in time to about get mowed down by a bicycle!  Not very many cars, but a ton of bikes.  They had these funny little bikes with big wooden boxes on the front that they would cart their kids and dogs and groceries around in.  I bet they all have awesome calves.

 dutch pancakes.  these were pretty awesome too.  strawberries, cream and a little nutella.  wow.

 we went on a canal cruise - amsterdam is a lot more accessible by canal than by car.  those little house boats on the left cost between 250 and a million dollars.  crazy.

 the house to the right of the umbrella was the hiding place for the Frank family during world ward 2.  I was kind of worried about going through the museum, but I was really glad we did.  Otto Frank was the only member of his family to survive and requested that all the furniture be taken out of the home, but that everything else remain the same.  The building below was the Frank family business (they made fruit preserves) and the upper rooms were where they hid.  You could tell how easy it would be in all those old buildings to not know there was extra space somewhere. Their was a big wooden and metal bookshelf built in front of the stairwell that hid the entrance to the hiding place. It swung open and led to a stair case.  It was amazing to actually walk behind that book shelf and up those steep steps.  How amazingly quiet they had to be for so long. Their were still pencil marks on the walls that marked the how tall the two sisters grew while they were there. The room that had been Anne's still has the pictures and comic strips that she had taken out of magazines and glued to the walls to make the dark room a little bit more happy.  She loved babies and had several pictures of smiling, cherubic looking little ones pasted all over.  She talked about how bad she wanted to just open a window - breath in fresh air and feel sunshine on her face.  To be able to run through the streets again. I thought it would be a lot more upsetting than it was -   but I think that more than anything she wanted her story to be told - she wanted to be an author and to share with others what her life was really like living in that little hidden space for two years - and even though her death and the death of her family was so horribly tragic - it was cool to see that her wish really did come true.  Her journals were printed and probably a lot more people (especially young people) have a better understanding of how inhumane and unjust world war 2 was because of it.  

so so many bikes.  this was taken by the train station.