Not exactly sure what else I'm supposed to be finding, but a good lifetime-rule-of-thumb is that when you see something with your last name in it, you take a picture of it. So I did.
What else did I find on Friday? Well, the five Calvin girls all had no class on Friday, so we decided to take a trip downtown to the Anne Frank House. It was a beautifully clear day
but still very, very cold. We thought by leaving Michigan we'd escape these temperatures, but apparently not. Fortunately we didn't have to wait in line all that long:
And who can complain when the line has views like this?
After about 15 minutes, we made it to the front:
No pictures inside.
The exhibit itself was very well put together, with a great mix of old and new elements. The rooms of the "hidden annex" itself have been left just as they were, but with no furniture (there are even still pencil marks on the wall where Anne's parents marked her and her sister's heights). Other sections of the house have videos, display cases, quotations on the wall, etc. It was all very well put together, and I thought it struck a good balance between the seriousness of the story (which could have been the story of thousands--millions of people, really) and the hope for resilience and survival (one quotation on the wall was from Nelson Mandela saying how they read the diary on Robben Island).
Anyway, it's one of those things you must do when in Amsterdam, and I'm glad I did. Afterwards, we decided to try another Amsterdam tradition, Vlaamse frites. In other words/languages, French fries. In hindsight, we may not have picked the best place to try them, and that's all I'm going to say on the matter.
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