18 August 2001. Our guide, Chris, has left us to our own devices for and hour or so and we try to make sense of our map and head off along the sides of the canals to try to find the Anne Frank house.
The canals of Amsterdam are extremely pretty. Tour boats ply up and down them constantly and houseboats are moored along their length.
As a backdrop Amsterdam's unique narrow houses stand - though not altogether entirely upright. Amsterdam is a little like Venice. The houses are built over the water on wooden piles. If air gets to those piles - in years when the water level drops - then the wooden piles start to rot and the result is as you can see here. Buildings suddenly become lean-tos...
We found the Anne Frank House. Anne and her Jewish family hid in extremely cramped quarters in this house during WWII from 1942 until 1944 when they were found by the Germans and transported to the concentration camps. Her diary, kept until a couple of days before they were found, was published after the war. Anne herself died in Bergen-Belsen two months before the war ended. Only her father Otto survived.
We thought we were lucky to see no queue coming out of the door, but then we noticed the sign that pointed to an entrance around the side and that did have a queue. So much of one in fact that we reluctantly decided we didn't have enough time to wait.
Walking around in the heat was hard work! We found a bench beside an old inn of 1695 whose piles had been exposed to air at some time causing them to start rotting and making the place lean. Here we sat for a while with a drink cooling off.
We had walked past a canal crowded with boats so close you could literally walk across from one to another. A huge floating stage area had been set up and technicians were building light gantries, testing TV cameras and one chap was interviewing a young girl in jeans who suddenly let fly a stream of operatic melody totally out of keeping with her dress... Good set of lungs...
We also saw, though weren't too tempted by, the Cannabis Connoisseurs Club and The Hash, Marijuana, and Hemp Museum!
And everywhere there were the bicycles. Sometimes heralded by bells. Sometimes heralded by a warning shout. Sometimes accompanied by a scream of agony. Why do they not have brakes? Very strange! We did have to wonder how you would ever find your own bike amongst the huge numbers of chained or abandoned bicycles.
But all it takes is a small piece of individuality!
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