Amsterdam

Em and I went with mom and Loel in the morning to one of the mission chapels to drop off some materials for the missionaries. It was fun meeting everyone and seeing how much the missionaries love and appreciate mom and Loel. The chapel was in Amsterdam so we left the car there and used public transportation to get to downtown Amsterdam.
Amsterdam is a very interesting city.




Probably about half of the streets have canals running through them with trees and bike paths lining the canals. Apparently there are more canals in Amsterdam than Venice. All the buildings are different colors but have similar architecture which gives the city its own unique feeling. Also, there are more bikes here than cars – and we definitely witnessed that.

We have never seen this many bikes in our lives – there were thousands. Every corner and fence had bikes chained up in stacks.
Our first site was the Anne Frank house. Before this trip Em and I hadn’t learned very much about Anne Frank or her diary but when we got to Belgium mom and Loel let us borrow ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ so we read lots of it before we went to the Anne Frank house. This made it one of our favorite museums of the trip.

It actually isn’t Anne Franks house but it is the ‘Secret Annex’ – where her and her family lived for two years when the Nazi’s occupied Belgium during the second world war. Overall the place had a somber feeling to it as it was very small and dark and made you wonder how a family could live there for two years without ever going outside. There were quotes from Anne Frank in all of the rooms that gave you a sense for what she was feeling. Of course it is also very sad that everyone in the house was eventually found and taken to a concentration camp where only the father survived. But we left feeling really glad we went there.

Our next stop was lunch at a famous pancake house in the area. Rick Steves recommended it and we loved it. We split three pancakes between the four of us – bacon and onion, chicken and cheese, and blueberry ice cream. There were all delicious.

For the next couple hours we mostly walked around the city and stopped in a few shops. Em and I both really love the city – it is such a unique and pretty place. We stopped at big candy shop where we tried tons of different candies then went across town to the Dutch Resistance Museum. This museum was all about the different ways in which the Dutch people resisted the Nazi’s.

It explained groups that made homemade radios, forged identity cards (Hitler’s way of keeping track of the Jews), and some that found ways to escape the city. It was a

fascinating museum and more uplifting than the Anne Frank house.
On our way home we stopped at the temple in Zoetermeer and walked around the grounds. It is a pretty small temple but really pretty. We then finished off the evening at a Chinese restaurant that mom and Loel had been to before. We got these dishes that gave us about 12 different foods that we could put on our rice – really fun and good.

We especially enjoyed the music (we were there about an hour and a half because the service was a little slow) that was like retro Nintendo music that you would have your kids listen to in time out as cruel and unusual punishment.