My flight to Egypt was via Amsterdam. If you’re going to have a long layover somewhere, Amsterdam is one of the better places you could choose. If your layover is only an hour or two, Amsterdam's Schipol airport has a big shopping mall and even a museum. And if you have more time than that, the city is just a short train ride away, with the train leaving directly from the airport, and conveniently located luggage lockers are available to stow your stuff.
Since I landed in Amsterdam at 11:30 a.m., and my plane to Cairo didn’t take off until 9 p.m., I had plenty of time to waste, so I took a train into the city to explore. I was jetlagged as hell (having spent a more or less sleepless night on the plane), but walking around a city sure beats hanging around an airport for nine and a half hours. Hopefully, I’ll sleep when I get to Cairo. [N.B. – that turned out to be a vain hope, as you’ll see from future entries.]
FLASHBACK: I’ve been to Amsterdam once before, on my post-college backpacking trip, never you mind how many years ago. The main thing I remembered about it was that it reeked of pot and that everyone tried to sell me drugs as I left the train station.
I was there for only two days on that trip, arriving on New Year’s Eve Day, and leaving on January 2. I had been backpacking around for a bit, and had been telling all the backpackers I met in hostels to meet me in front of the Dam on New Year’s Eve Day at 3 pm. What do you know -- at least eight of them decided to show, including a woman from Belgium, two woman from The Netherlands, a guy from Colombia, a guy from South Africa, and three guys from Israel.
We went to grab a bite to eat. After we finished eating, we were standing in a crowded street discussing what to do next, when Agie (the woman from Belgium), felt someone fumbling in her bag, and we caught a pickpocket red-handed with her wallet in his hand. He took off running, and without giving it any thought at all, I took off after him. He was hampered by the crowds in his way, and I soon caught up to him and grabbed his jacket. He shoved me to the sidewalk, but Camillo (the guy from Colombia) was right behind me and hit the pickpocket. The pickpocket punched Camillo in the jaw.
Bystanders intervened and Agie got her wallet back, and the pickpocket was marched off to the police. Unfortunately, Camillo’s jaw was broken. We went to the emergency room to have it wired shut. However, that didn’t stop Camillo from partying most of the night with us, sipping drinks through a straw. END FLASHBACK.
I had no clear memory of the city itself, and actually, no memory of what the “Dam” was, except that it involved a building with a square, but I hadn’t been wandering more than twenty minutes before I found myself in Dam Square. I recognized it immediately, and confirmed it on my map – I was standing just where I’d stood to meet my backpacking friends never you mind how many years ago.
I tried to remember where we’d gone in the city and where Camillo’s jaw had been broken, but that was all lost in the mists of memory. Nothing else looked particularly familiar to me, although the old town certainly smelled familiar.
Somehow I hadn’t remembered how pretty the canals and row houses were. I think my current conception of beauty was still being formed at that time – indeed, that trip was pretty fundamental in beginning to form it. I remembered being moved by the beauty of Bruges and Paris and Venice, but somehow Amsterdam’s had passed me by in all the commotion. I noticed it this time, though. I ate a good lunch, I ambled over to the Anne Frank House for a visit, but mostly I just strolled along the pretty canals.
I don’t think I ever made it to the Anne Frank house on my first trip to Amsterdam. I was broke, and I was too busy doing whatever it was I was doing. I’d read Anne Frank’s diary when I was about eleven years old, and found it really moving. I related to the little girl living in an attic and her crush on the boy trapped in there with her, even if, at age eleven, I found it hard to fully imagine the fear that must have lived there with them. (If you’ve never read the diary, by the way, you should. It may have been written by a child, but it’s not a children’s book.)
Unfortunately, it was hard to get the real ambiance of the house. It’s absolutely packed to the gills with tourists with not much room left for pathos, and they keep you marching forward at a pretty brisk pace. Like it or not, you’re spat out the door in half an hour to forty-five minutes, not quite clear on how you got there, and with no clear sense of the rooms the Frank family lived in and the life they must have led in them. Maybe if you go first thing in the morning, it’s better.
The single most touching thing in the house, I think, was a black and white photograph of Anne’s father standing alone in the attic after the war, with the knowledge that his family was dead and he was the only one of them left alive. (Anne died only a month before the war ended; her mother and sister pre-deceased her, and she never knew that her father was still alive.) I pushed my way to the wall where the photo was hanging and just gazed at it for a bit, and there at last, looking at Mr. Frank's face as he stood in the empty attic, I felt some of the sadness and the life that Anne’s diary pulses with.
There was also a video interview with Mr. Frank done in the 1960’s that was well worth a listen. He noted that the Anne he met in the diary was not the little girl he knew as his daughter—he had no idea how passionate and thoughtful she was. He mused that he doesn’t think parents ever really know their children.
* * * * *
After forty-five minutes, the house shot me out onto the sidewalk, blinking in bewilderment as to how I’d got there. I stood for a moment, gazing at the view Anne must have known so well, and then walked back to the train station in a mild drizzle to catch my flight to Cairo.
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