May 18 to 19, 2007 Impressions in Holland

Dear Family and Friends,

Part of Martha's family hails from Holland, VA, so it’s only natural that she should seek out the country that goes by that name, right? Dani and Martha arrived in Holland by ferry, leaving London by train Wednesday night. We took the train out to seaside town of Harwich, which we learned was quite a destination spot itself, having been a favorite inspirational spot to John Constable, one of my new favorite landscape painters, and was an important sea port during the English colonization of America. (No, Dani, John Constable is not the ‘big JC.')

We stayed up too late again, enjoying the buffet dinner of assorted fish, chicken, and desserts. Dani took tastes of each of the desserts 'to determine what they were.' Martha sipped an Amstel or three, and we waited for the ship to take off. We stayed up on deck to watch the lights of the harbor town disappear. Martha has written before that there is nothing like sleeping on a ship, and she still believes it to be the best sleep of her life every time. Too soon, the chimes introduced the morning’s arrival, we hopped out of bed to enjoy the morning buffet and its wonderful coffee. Martha fell asleep at the table (jumping out of bed and moving never quite works for her).

Fed, repacked, and ready to go, we lugged our packs off the boat, onto a train, through the countryside, and to Centraal Station in Amsterdam. After some wandering with aim but no direction, we stood behind some kids in from San Francisco who had just graduated university. The guy right in front of us was headed to Philly to take on his first big job, in fact. We purchased the I amsterdam pass for 48 hours at 43 euro each. It gave us: full access to all public transport in the city (trolleys, trains, buses, metro … the public transportation system in Amsterdam is par none that we have seen); entry to most museums in the city; a guidebook with map, descriptions of the museums, and a ticket to get in; and also tickets for 25% off certain services around town. Totally worth it for us, as we hopped on and around the city as we wanted to, enjoyed the half hour to plan the day on our Metro ride to our hotel—the Tulip Inn Riverside Amsterdam—about eight kilometres out of town (beside a river, overlooking a field, so serene compared with downtown), visited four museums, and took two canal boat tours around town.

Still Friday, May 18, we made our way with our packs to the hotel, checked in, took showers, agreed to return to our lodgings about 9 PM so we could get a good night’s sleep and attack the city with lots of energy on Saturday, and headed back to the Metro to explore. We walked the city and got our bearings. Our strides are getting more powerful now, I can feel it. Each day of rich urban hiking is wearing the toxins and other nonsense out of our bodies, letting it go into the air, vapor. Smoke among the smoke of this city. The air is otherwise so clean here. The pollution is minimized by the person-power transport in this city of bicycles, small cars, and canals lined with houseboats and transportation water vehicles.

Pedestrians rule in most areas of the city, and flee the mad jingles of cyclists at other times. It was evening time after our walk along the canals. Back at Centraal Station, we hopped onto the 100 Historical Sites canal cruise and enjoyed a nice slow trip around the city, which gave us some historical context to the buildings, as well as a general feel of the layout of landmarks. The hour-long cruise brought us into the early evening, about 8 PM, and we thought about heading back for that good night’s sleep … but kept going.

The sunlight here lasts longer than at home, which we didn’t really notice until well after 11 PM. We’d taken to enjoying a small to medium to large beer at different hot spots in the city, finding the people-watching here to be exceptionally interesting. So many different shapes to faces, colors and styles of clothing, looks of bedraggled, enlightened, worn, and invigorated. Truly a magnificent mezcla of peoples in this cute, cute town of narrow buildings of brick. We’d taken so many photos and enjoyed so much, and the sun had just lasted so darn long, it was close to 1 AM when we finally got to sleep.

Saturday, May 19, Day 5, we gloriously slept until 10:30 AM, recognized that we had 189 days left to our journey (!), and were out the door and headed to the city an hour later. By the time our Metro trip had ended, we had plans: the Anne Frank Huis, Van Gogh museum, something to eat eventually, and another canal ride in the evening. We walked slowly and scenically, teaching ourselves to stroll, eating some breakfast pastries of cheese and meat, and taking pictures of the canal ways and pretty flowers.

Our eventual destination was down to the Anne Frank Huis to pay umbrage to a young journalist of a girl who’s life was cut too short by the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. Her father owned a spice warehouse downtown in Amsterdam, and when the Germans invaded, he talked with his non-Jewish colleagues/friends and asked them to help them hide in a bigger-than-I-imagined upper attic space of rooms above the warehouse itself (and it's unknowing workers).


Two families and one other gentleman--the Franks with their two daughters, the Van Peels with their son, and Mr. Pfeffer--hid in that space for two years until someone anonymously tipped off the Nazis to their location. Only Otto Frank, the father, survived the war. Anne and her sister, Margot, died of typhoid fever in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; Anne died at the age of 15, just a month before the Allied liberation of Holland, and maybe could have held on after her mother and sister died had she known that her father was still alive.

When Otto Frank knew for sure that his daughters were dead, one of the women who had helped to keep them safe in the Secret Annex of the warehouse handed Anne’s diaries to Mr. Frank, saying, “This is your daughter’s legacy.” And he turned it into just that, a voice of the discriminated and the fearful in times of danger and persecution. Their home, her words, and their story today serve as a lesson, and add a pretty little face, to the horrors of the truth of the Holocaust. A life cut too short, Anne Frank’s passion for writing, her strength in trying to keep her innocence and optimism in the face of terror, and to express those emotions in words … a life-long inspiration of Martha's to keep putting text to paper. It was an honor to visit Anne's home and the Secret Annex that has fed the minds of so many, as well as to see the inside of one of the homes in this town, with its dangerously-breakneck stairwells.

On our way South in the city, we stopped at the Houseboat Museum to learn about another sort of home in Amsterdam--the floating boat-homes that line the canals. A total of 2,500 of these vessels, many adorned with brilliantly-colored flowers and outside decks on the side of the boats facing the canals, house folks in Amsterdam, and it was neat to see the open space and use of cubby-hole space in these "houses." Probably not a stop we would have made if not for the I amsterdam card!

Next, we headed farther South for the Van Gogh Museum, an important part of our journey since Dani thought little of Van Gogh’s work after seeing the few presented in the National Gallery in London. She still doesn’t think he’s the most wonderful artist, especially after seeing Van Gogh’s Chair, which she found simplistic, but does now admit that he had some skill. Martha is a fan of his work and the difficulties of his life since epilepsy is part of her family’s history, too. She loved seeing so many of his works, especially Almond Blossoms (which used to hang in someone’s house growing up, but she can’t recall where she studied it before … Mom or Dad, do you know?) and Wheat Field Under Threatening Skies, mythically his final work and foreboding of his suicide. We also saw Farmer at Sunset and a second of his five Sunflowers paintings with bright yellow background (we saw the first at the National Gallery, London); Gauguin also did a portrait of Van Gogh which hanged in the museum among treats by the other masters that well-complimented Van Gogh's works. And afterwards, we stopped for libation and some snackies.

Having spent the afternoon staring at the strokes of such an artist, it was great to enjoy the evening sun once again along the canals on a second canal boat trip, hearing the descriptions of the buildings for a second time in English and Spanish (and German and Dutch). Afterwards, we walked more, drank more, took more pictures, and then passed into the 10:45 PM darkness of night sitting in the Leidseplein square, where the punks had gathered for a chaos convention. And, yes, our curiosity got the better of us and we walked through the Red Light district. Interesting to see women displaying themselves under literal red lights, down one alley then another … the women change or disappear from the windows as “gentlemen” pay for their attentions. And the entire district is marked by short poles with Red Lights blocking the streets off. We then caught the late bus back through the countryside to our hotel, and slept too little once again.

More to come about our Sunday in Amsterdam, with Dani's impressions of the architecture and feel of the city, and our not-so-fun plane ride to Madrid!

Much love,

Martha and Dani