Tag: Amsterdam

So I ended this trip the way I started it: exploring a foreign city by myself. Dan had to go back to Gent for an all-day work meeting, a compromise move so he didn’t have to extend his stay to attend a session in Mannheim, Germany, the following Tuesday. He was never able to really disconnect from work on this trip, so he’s still in need of a vacation.

But it was good for me in a way. It reminded me – as did those first days in Mainz and Frankfurt – of when I was 16 and explored Chicago all day by myself. I’m very comfortable being alone, even when everything around me is – literally – foreign to me. I like the time for reflection and being completely independent, and just going wherever my mood takes me.

I set out about 8:30am. Mostly I just walked, had laid out a plan based on the map Sven gave us of what I wanted to see. I decided I was museumed-out at first, but changed my mind about that later. It was enjoyable to just go at my own pace, casually stroll through their version of Central Park, and start thinking my way through the transition of not being on vacation anymore. Three weeks is a long time.

I took a few pictures, below, stopping once at a cafe for a croissant and coffee. Which reminds me, I don’t think I’ve talked about the coffee in Europe: spectacular. In every cafe or restaurant we were in, the coffee was always ground and brewed to order using a high pressure coffee maker, so it was always very smooth, very fresh. The only time we had bad coffee was in hotels where it was brewed and poured from a carafe. And in hindsight, those probably tasted much like what we get at home, we’d just gotten spoiled by then.

I also explored chocolate shops!, tasting here and there as I went. The Belgians really do know how to make chocolate.

Side view of the Royal Palace.

Front of Royal Palace.

Another random square! I didn’t notice until I got home how much this building looked like the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

This was a very cool little park across the street from the coffee shop I stopped at.

This is the old Stock Exchange building, now used for exhibitions. It’s where we met Erwin and Yannick the night before because it’s pretty central and hard to miss. Since they were having a Da Vinci exhibit, and how often do you get a chance to do that?, I decided to check it out. It was pretty cool. Mostly it was prototypes made of all of his inventions – including a tank! – that even he had never actually made, only sketched.

And finally, by special request:

The infamous closed door toilet rooms. Never did see a stall in 3 weeks in 3 countries. This was taken in the building above.

I stopped for lunch at a place Sven had recommended – Ellis, funnily for Ellis Island! – and had a good burger and Belgian fries, probably the best fries I’d had the whole trip. I was tired and just went back to the townhouse and showered and vegged until Dan got back around 6pm. We went out for dinner at another place Sven had recommended, had a great meal. We typically eat around 6:30 and some restaurants don’t even open until 7pm we discovered, so we didn’t need reservations as we were the first ones there. But it filled up quickly and was packed by the time we left around 8pm. We made sure we were packed and all that, knowing we’d have an early start the following day.

Home. We were So Ready.

The hotel owner in Bruges (Paul – we found his place on PurpleRoofs.com, too) honored our request for an early breakfast and we left at 8am to catch a bus to the train station. While we had walked the almost 2 miles on Monday, it was a bit of a hassle with the luggage. Plus we were tired!, and we knew it would be a long day and wanted to save time and energy.

Our next stop was Gent. Dan had been there several times for work (to return the next day, 4/5/13, for work again…while on vacation…*sigh*), but had never had the opportunity to do much other than work. Since it’s on the way to Brussels from Bruges, we made a somewhat last minute decision to get to Brussels later than we’d originally planned and spend some time in Gent.

The train ride was just about 30 minutes. (Seems like you can get to many other places in Europe in just 30 minutes by train!) We checked our bags into a locker and walked the 2 miles or so from the train station to the Centrum. We found the visitor’s office and got a self guided Walking Tour that served us just fine, and started right outside that spot.

So first a little comparison between Bruges and Gent, from our perspective, that will likely horrify a few folks who are very fond of Bruges. When we were planning this trip, we went back and forth between these two in terms of where we were going to spend decent time. After carefully considering the recommendations of several different friends, and Rick Steves (the travel writer if you don’t know that name), we decided to stay in Bruges, and the place we wanted to stay had a 3 night minimum so we went with that because we knew we would lose a big chunk of the day that first day in train travel from Amsterdam, so that would still give us two full days. So the plan was: 3 nights in Bruges, 2 nights in Brussels, and we threw the Gent stop in later.

If we were doing it over again, we would stay 2-3 nights in Gent, 2-3 nights in Brussels, with a day trip to Bruges. Bruges was beautiful, interesting in a learn-what-kills-a-city sort of way, and yes romantic. But oh-so-touristy. More like an amusement park from that perspective. It’s a town that gets by completely from tourism. There’s not really a “local” vibe there. In fact, the locals we talked to really, Really didn’t like living there, because it was so touristy. And a big part of our pleasure in traveling is getting a local vibe, a feel for how does one live in the place we’re visiting, and from that perspective this wasn’t a good place to do that. It’s like Main Street, Disneyland, only with a population of 120k, and of course a lot older.

Gent, on the other hand, had more of the energy we were looking for. It’s a fully functioning city of about 250k, plus it has old beautiful buildings just like Bruges did, and perhaps more. The belfry is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site (that’s now 6 on this trip). We loved the churches – cause we couldn’t seem to get enough on this trip – and one for sure was up there with the prettiest we’d seen on the whole trip.

We started with – yay! – visiting another castle. This one was completely different than the first we saw in Koblenz. For one, it’s right in the middle of everything, you turn this corner and suddenly: Castle. And it’s older, dating back to 1180. It’s function was more fortification, less residence, where the first was the other way around. But we enjoyed it. Here are some pictures from that visit.

Right away, you get that “old and authentic” feeling when you approach this thing.

And it’s still friggin’ cold, can you tell?

Some of the Gent skyline from the “fortress” part on the roof of the castle.

They had a cool weapons room. This suit of armor was intricately engraved.

A view of the square below from the little lookout window at the top.

Guillotine!, last used in 1861.

Just some of the old weapons on display.

This was used as a chapel.

Basement? Dungeon? It was sorta underground.

A little park as we continued the walking tour, next to a little restaurant where we had lunch.

It was adorable, and had possibly the best onion soup we’ve ever had. Dan had a pasta dish he really liked and I had a local favorite – Flemish Stew, a beef dish in a rich, dark brown gravy.

There wasn’t any place to sit at first, then we noticed the people at this table vacating, so we snagged the best spot in the place.

The canal view from the St. Michael’s bridge. The walking tour said “many tourist guides describe this as one of the most beautiful cityscapes in Europe.” That statement incorporates this and the next three pictures. What do you think?

Also from the St. Michael’s bridge.

Lamppost on the bridge.

The Belfry. Since we had already climbed Cologne and Bruges we passed on this. Like the castle, this was built in 1180; UNESCO deemed it a World Heritage Site in 1999.

There are a bunch of churches in the Gent Centrum. Dan went crazy with pictures, but I’m only going to include some from the most impressive – the St. Bavo’s Cathedral. The contrast of dark wood and marble was stunning.

This is not St. Bavo’s and I no longer remember which church it was. But it’s a good shot of a couple of things I wanted to point out: 1. The chairs. That’s what we saw in every church in Belgium and Netherlands, where in Germany the churches all had traditional pews. I guess the Dutch don’t kneel! 2. The pulpit. That’s that thing on the right in the middle of the church. The priest climbs the stairs and delivers the sermon from there. The picture below is a closer shot. We saw these in just about every church we went into. I’ve never seen one in America that I can recall.

These are original pillars from the 1100’s in the crypt, where archbishops are buried.

A little neighborhood we walked around that had that look I love with the narrow streets….

And that’s enough of Gent. We have more pictures but I think you get the idea! We did really enjoy this city, and today gave Dan an interesting perspective compared to what he’d seen before, including walking by one of the hotels he’s stayed at. He had no idea he was so close to everything we saw today when he was there. We took the bus back to the train station, collected our luggage and went on to Brussels.

Dan’s work colleagues had influenced our decision to minimize our time in Brussels, that it’s mostly a big city, known as “the capital of Europe”, but there isn’t much to see as a tourist. We disagreed almost as soon as we walked out of the train station, because we really like hanging out in really active places and that’s clearly where we were. I got a NYC vibe right away, although this is much smaller than that. Dan will likely find a way to spend some more time here on one of his trips back.

We were making our way to the townhouse we’re staying in, a single-guest bed & breakfast in the home of a gay couple, Erik and Sven, also found on PurpleRoofs.com. We come across a little square where there’s a lot of activity, including some street musicians on a random Thursday afternoon, and Dan’s like “hey, this is very cool so far, I wish we were spending more time here.” We keep walking through this narrow street, and at the end take a right into another square. And stop dead in our tracks. Our jaws dropped as we stared at what we decided is the most impressive and beautiful square we’d seen on the whole trip: Grote Markt, or Great Market, all of it built around 1669 and also, we learned later, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. That makes #7 for this trip. Here are some pictures of the that square. They really don’t do it justice.

We made it to the townhouse and were greeted by Sven, who was very gracious, offered us coffee, gave us a very useful tourists map of the central area, and made several suggestions for restaurants and other places of interest. The decor of the townhouse was, well let’s just say not our style. It was very stylistic, not exactly comfortable, a good example of form over function we thought. Our hosts, however, were very nice and we enjoyed visiting with them here and there the next couple of days.

We’d gotten to their place around 5:15, and left around 6:45 to explore a bit before meeting some folks for dinner at 8:30 for dinner. A friend of mine had suggested we get together with her friends while we were in the neighborhood, so we did. (Thanks, Michele!) Their names are Erwin and Yannick. Right away, we knew it would be interesting. Erwin had said in his email as we were finalizing plans, “You’ll probably notice us quite easily: a Caucasian/Asian gay couple isn’t very hard to spot.” We were like “hmmm, what a coincidence.” Erwin, on the right below, is an MD working on a PhD; Yannick, on the left, is in HR. Funny, right? (If you missed that: Dan has a PhD, I’m in HR; it’s like they were this reverse mirror image of us…)We had a great local meal – this time Dan had the Flemish stew – and lively conversation. It was fun!

We are definitely ready to come home, especially Dan who came out 6 days ahead of me for work. And, he just learned he will have to work in Gent on Friday, but that’s instead of having to extend his stay into next week. Definitely better than that. It means I will do Brussels by myself, which is fine; I feel bad that he hasn’t really been able to disconnect from work much this trip. And at the same time, grateful that that hasn’t been an issue in my job at all.

We did so much yesterday there wasn’t much left to see. After breakfast in the hotel, we went to Belfort to climb the 366 steps to the top of the belfry. After 533 steps in the Cologne belfry this was a snap! It was a spiral staircase, of course, only with a literal twist: it would be clockwise, then suddenly counter for a bit, then clockwise again, an  then change one more time.

Have I mentioned how much Europe likes spiral staircases? They are the rule apparently, not the exception. Even the staircase in our hosts home in Amsterdam was spiral. He was an architect – so I asked him about that. Was it to save space? Yes, he said, they take up less space, but mostly we just like them. Alrighty then! Since you can’t get furniture up them, you either assemble yourself – the appeal of IKEA made sense for the first time – or hoist up through windows. We saw lots of furniture hooks in Amsterdam, and today we saw an outside ladder with a lift on it taking things up to a 3rd floor window. Do we have this stuff in America and I just never noticed?

Anyway, I digress. Belfort:

There was a market going on in the square and we perused that for a bit after. Always fun to see what the locals buy.

That was the last of the “must-do’s”, and we went to the list of “maybe” and “if we get around to it”. Bruges is full of drive-by things to do that may or may not be interesting to you, but don’t take very long. I list them here for our own memory but most are not worth writing about:

1. Chocolate museum – the most interesting on this list, and of course there were samples!
2. Lamp museum – I kid you not. The only reason we went was it was in the same building as the Chocolate place and came with the pass we were using. We were the only ones in it!
3. Fries museum – as in Belgian. History of the potato and how to make Belgian Fries. No samples, but we had lunch here and it was decent.
4. Folklore museum
5. A two room place about a local poet, Geselle.
6. Lace museum – only because it came with the next one
7. Jeruzalemkerk – this was not on our list, we stumbled upon it and are glad we did. It’s a family chapel modeled after a church in Jerusalem, which also serves as the family tomb. We’ve seen a lot of churches on this trip and this was the most unique.

We went back to the room to rest and clean up, and had the best meal of the trip for dinner at a country French restaurant. It was in an alley and worked by two sisters. 18 people capacity. Every table but one was reserved and that filled early. It was a lovely dinner. Dan had cassoulet and I had sea bass. Both were excellent. With coffee and dessert of course.

We will spend the day Thursday in Gent and our last two nights in Brussels. Home on Saturday.

You know you’re tired when you’re looking forward to being immobilized for 12 hours on a plane.

We did so many little things today I am not even going to attempt to write about each one. The reader can go to Trip Advisor if interested in more detail :) I am going to treat this instead as a photo diary, with a simple list, maybe some description, and photos to support. Dan sent me 72 pics to consider out of the 100+ he started with. I am including 25 here.

I will start with a brief history for context. Bruges was a major center for finance, trade and art in its prime, during the centuries between 1200-1500. It fell out of favor when it didn’t keep up with mercantile progress, and lost its shipping capabilities when the canal to the North Sea silted. Antwerp became a bigger economic center after that, and remains so today (especially in diamonds). Bruges was considered a dead city by 1850, but tourists became interested later that century. For much of the next hundred years it focused on building tourism and restoring its medieval roots. This paid off big when UNESCO (covered yesterday) added it to its list of World Heritage Sites in 2000. It now gets about 2 million visitors a year.

The purpose of most of the attractions is to give the visitor a sense of the city’s history, a sense of what it was like to live there 600 years ago, enjoy really beautiful things, and various combinations of those objectives.

All that said, here’s what we did today:

This guy did the demo in 3 languages: English, Dutch, French. It was pretty impressive. He had a slight cough and would even say “excuse me” in whatever language he was speaking at the time when he coughed! He easily switched to whatever language the audience used during the Q&A session.

Salvador Dali exhibit was last. Here are a couple of Dan’s favorites from there.

We left the Amsterdam apartment about 7:30 this morning, and got to our Bruges hotel around 2:30. We were scheduled to leave at 7:55 but that train was cancelled. The reroute would get us here 1.5 hours later than planned. The good news: just two transfers instead of three, with time enough in between the last one for a sandwich at the Antwerp train station.

I had never heard of Bruges until a party we had last May. Instead of name tags, Dan asked people to share a place they really enjoyed visiting. Through that process, our friends Greg & Robert from Sacramento had a lively conversation with our Davis neighbors, Jo and Kay, because they had all been to Bruges before. (Later, I met people who knew of the town only because of  a Colin Farrell movie called “In Bruges” which we saw a few months ago; it’s worth seeing.)

Greg was also who I learned about UNESCO from: United Nations Educational, Scientific and  Cultural Organization. They certify places to be on their World Heritage list based on  their outstanding value to humanity. On this trip so far we have visited four World Heritage Sites (if you count Anne Frank museum):

• Upper Middle Rhine Valley
• Cologne Cathedral
• The Canal District of Amsterdam
• At the Anne Frank house, we learned her diaries are listed in UNESCO’S Memory of the World Register

And today makes 5: the Historic Center of Bruges makes the list “as an outstanding example of a medieval historic settlement”. Today we just walked around to get oriented, and will have two full days here. A few pictures below from our walk. More about what’s what as we actually visit places.

 

 

 

 

Some observations about similarities and differences of the three countries so far, in no particular order:

• OMG the smokers! All three. At least they can’t smoke indoors, but seems like you see many times the number of smokers than we’re used to in the US – on the streets, in doorways, and at outside eating areas.
• Bicycles everywhere, especially Netherlands, and Amsterdam was off the hook: 40% of all traffic is on 2 wheels. In the Centrum (European equivalent-ish to downtown, or central area) many streets are bikes only, no cars. And bikers in Amsterdam are aggressive, they definitely rule there.
• Germans were all about bakeries, especially sweets. Amsterdam was all about “coffeeshops” and Argentinean restaurants (we never did figure out that connection). So far, Belgium is all about chocolate, waffles, and french fries. Although waffles are a dessert or snack item, not breakfast.
• Trains: In Germany, getting asked for the ticket was the exception. In Netherlands, we were asked more than half the time. Today, in a 4.5 hour ride between Amsterdam and Bruges, we were asked 4x, twice on the same Belgian train.
• Only the American hotel, the Hilton in Mainz, provided little soaps, shampoos, lotions.  All the European hotels provided “wash” type products (which I like) in hand dispensers at the sink and shower. No lotion. And all of the showers are the hand-held kind, even the Hilton.

A few more Bruges pictures. It’s still cold, dang it.

We are still in “take it easy” mode. That’s allowed on vacation, right? It was nearly 10 by the time we decided to get up and Dan announced, “no, it’s really 11 – look at my phone, the time changed last night.” I’d forgotten he told me yesterday Europe was on a different schedule and that was happening. Oh well!

Our first meal was essentially lunch then, these pot pies we bought at the outside market in Haarlem yesterday, along with some coleslaw and bread.

We finally left around 1pm but didn’t have much on the agenda: a canal boat ride (cuz you kinda have to), and some meandering through some less touristy neighborhoods, specifically Jordaan.

We saw and learned a few things we hadn’t known on the canal ride, but mostly it was pretty and relaxing. I’ve included a few pictures at the end. Jordaan was very pleasant, with nice neighborhood shops and children’s playgrounds. It convinced me Amsterdam might be more livable day-to-day than I had thought. We came across a little Japanese pastry shop (“taiyaki”) and got a fresh warm snack for the rest of the walk home. Did I mention it was snowing again when we woke up? By this time it had warmed up to about 40. The news said it was colder in Europe on Easter (which today was) this year than it was last Christmas.

We had accepted a tea invitation with our hosts and met them around 4:30. They live in the same building on a lower floor. A delightful couple who have lived here 35 years together, him before that as it was his father’s place: Karla, a dental hygienist, and Ben, an architect. Their two daughters are in college, one in Vancouver BC, the other in Kobe Japan – so a 16 hour time zone spread with the parents in the middle.

Karla and Ben are well traveled, she has lived in the US at times, they have both visited quite a bit. Each have an interesting WW II connection. She is part Indonesian. Her father was a POW of the Japanese in the Pacific. He survived and lived to be 94. We’ve learned since we’ve been here that prior to the war, Indonesia was a Dutch Colony because of the trading there by the Dutch East India Company. Children of Dutch men and Indonesian women were called Indo-Europeans. After the war, Indonesia became independent and they had/got to pick which country they wanted to be a citizen of. It explains why there is such a large Indonesian population here. (And why so many Indonesian restaurants. We were going to eat again at that first one today but it was closed. We experienced the same thing in Germany last week: lots of stuff is closed on Sunday.)

Ben’s father was one of the Dutch non-Jews who went into hiding to escape the German labor camps. All men aged 18-45 were essentially ordered to be slave labor. He managed to escape that and survived the war as well.

We had a lovely visit for over an hour over tea and pastry (surprise!).

And speaking of locals, we met a young woman a few nights ago in the checkout of the grocery store. She overheard us asking the cashier questions about credit cards (which I could do a whole thing about but won’t – just ask us about it before you come to Netherlands!) and figured out we were American. Either by the content of the conversation, or our accents, which I was amused to learn we had from the Portugese waiter a few nights ago.

Anyway, she was an interesting gal named Mariela: 27, born in Italy with the accent to prove it, but has lived all over with her family and speaks 7 languages. She has been in Amsterdam for 5 years while studying to be a sexologist. She talked to us non-stop on a freezing sidewalk about all kinds of things for 30 minutes, including her issues with Dutch culture and how phony it is, prostitution, and various lovers she had. Mostly to get her to quit talking, Dan said we had to go (we did, he actually had a Pacific Time work call that night) and we should have dinner one night while we’re here. They’ve been texting since. He texted her about dinner around 1:30 today. We hadn’t heard from her by 6pm so went on with our evening. She was a character. I was both a little disappointed and a lot relieved.

We needed to pack and start planning the details of our stay in Bruges so just went to – ready? – a bakery around the corner and got some savory pastries, and some bread to eat with the remaining cheese we had in the refrigerator from our first trip to the grocery on Monday. We also had an interesting fruit salad – mayo based of course, did you forget where you were? – from the Haarlem market yesterday. Dan normally doesn’t eat bread but he has been crazed about the baked goods here.

And that was pretty much our day. We leave early tomorrow for the 4.5 hour train ride to Bruges.

Here are some pictures from the canal boat ride.

There are a fair number of houseboats. Would be a trip to live in one, eh?

Another light-ish day. I think we’re both feeling the pace a little bit. Not that I’m complaining! We come home a week from today and the rest of the trip should be pretty relaxing.

The large floor tiles are actually tomb covers, and Frans Hals is buried there.

We did one final trip to the outdoor market to pick up some things for dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow, then back to the train station to come home. Well, our home for 7 days anyway.

Curiosity Item:
I can’t say for sure that I could have told you what country Amsterdam was in before we started planning this trip. I probably would have said Holland. And even folks from Netherlands will refer to it Holland. But I learned that Holland is not a country, but provinces – two of them in fact: North Holland and South Holland. And they make up a majority of the country Netherlands, but not all of it.

• So my question became: where did Dutch come from? Germans come from Germany, Italians from Italy, but you’re Dutch if you’re from Netherlands or Holland. We asked a volunteer at the church who we had a fun conversation with. Her response? “You’re right, I never thought about it. But I do believe it comes from Deutch.” We even looked up the entomology of it and got a long, unsatisfying answer. I was hoping for something “ah-ha” like but no such luck.

And under the “You’re on Candid Camera” category:
Dan has this habit of taking rapid successive pictures on his iPhone so he’ll have plenty to pick from. He took about 20 of me on the train this morning in about 10 seconds. These are the only ones I didn’t make him delete.

Pretty sure I’m pointing out an Ikea.

We were both so tired last night from a week or more of 7 miles a day on foot on average we decided to take it easy today.

We slept in and finally got going around 10:30am. To be nice to our feet, see other parts of the city, and live like a local for a day, we bought a 24-hour public transportation pass. We used it on the tram (streetcar), but you can use it on the bus or metro (subway), too. We used it for most of our transportation today, and at the end took some extra rides just to see areas we hadn’t been in yet.

We discovered they were very comfortable and the windows were huge! This was taken from the rear:

We got off to go to the Jewish Historical Museum. We didn’t know until we got there it included a Portuguese Synagogue from 1675, still in use.

The synagogue itself (as opposed to the annexes where kitchens and office are) has no electricity. Notice the candle chandeliers, which provide the only light source.

This room was originally only used as a seminary. After World War II, the congregation was so small they used this as the synagogue for many years.

There were a lot of smaller rooms where we learned about kosher food and preparation, mikveh, shofars, and mourning rituals.

The small room where the candles and candlesticks are stored. It takes 2 hours for one person to light the candles on the first floor, and 3 hours if doing the ladies gallery, too.

Next was the Jewish Historical Museum across the street. It was housed in a synagogue built in 1671 and used continuously until after WW II when the community was decimated and the building eventually boarded up. In the 80s, the relatively few Jews who were still in Amsterdam were concerned about the developing white supremacy groups at the time. The synagogue was restored and turned into a museum in 1987 in part in response to that, to help remind the world what happened so it wouldn’t happen again.

There were over 100,000 Dutch Jews before the war. While Anne Frank’s story of hiding is the most famous, over 25,000 Dutch Jews went into hiding. About 18,000 of those survived. Only 22% of all Dutch Jews survived the war.

There were about 80,000 Jews in Amsterdam before the war, and less than 5000 after. Today, there are about 45,000.

This museum went into a lot of detail about what brought Jews to Amsterdam during the Golden Age of 1650-1750, with the ups and downs leading up to the war, and the after effects. It took the personal foundation we got at the Anne Frank House and expanded it.

After lunch, we went to the Dutch Resistance Museum. We found this as absorbing as the WW II museum in New Orleans last year. This was similar in the level of detail, variety of perspectives, and mix of media used. Our understanding was expanded yet again. You really got a sense of how everyone in the Netherlands was impacted by German occupation, not just the Jewish perspective, although that was the most horrific.

Some things I did not know:

• The Dutch had created a German refugee camp, Westerbork, for Jews escaping persecution from the Nazis. Shortly after the German occupation it was turned into a transit camp, a holding space for Jews waiting to be shipped to concentration camps. (Now that’s ironic – not a black fly in your Chardonnay…)
• Jews weren’t the only ones who went into hiding.  Thousands of non-Jews ignoring orders to work in German labor camps also hid, as well as hundreds who were part of the Resistance, working secretly with the Dutch monarchy who had been based in England since the Occupation, and, among other things, arranged secret financing networks for those in hiding. It takes a lot of money to hide 30,000 people.
• At the beginning of the Occupation in 1940, many of the Dutch saw it as just the next step in the way things were going across Europe. So little changed, they initially thought it wouldn’t be that bad. The Nazis were subtle in their approach at first in the hopes of bringing the people along. Orders were followed without much question, including registration and ID carrying requirements. It wasn’t until they started rounding up the Jews in 1942 that the reality started to take hold and the Resistance movement grew stronger.

While many American families were significantly impacted by this war, today’s visits made it abundantly clear that what was happening in Europe was a completely different kind of terror.  I’d always known that intellectually; it was beneficial to get closer to it.

It was a good day of learning and reflection.

The Hague is the 3rd largest city in Netherlands, about 37 miles southeast of Amsterdam on the North Sea. It is home to the International Court of Justice, the judicial function of the United Nations. One of the streets is named for JFK.

It is much different from Amsterdam. Skyscrapers for one, with of course still lots of old stuff mixed in, including Parliamentary buildings from the Middle Ages (see below). While Amsterdam is the capital constitutionally, much of the country’s business gets conducted here. But they, too, ride a lot of bikes here – look at these in front of the train station.

These two were Dan’s favorites.

And this was just amazing: many paintings in a painting. Incredible detail.