After a lot of scrambling & running around, I was travel ready! As usual, travelling across timezones is no fun. The best part of long flights is the inflight entertainment. I finally caught up on my Oscar movies - Black Swan and King's Speech. Loved both the movies. The former was a tad bit disturbing - my kind of movie ;)First impression of Amsterdam - the entire city seems to be under renovation and there are too many bicycles. I thought driving in India was scary... I almost closed my eyes sitting in the cab and seeing the bicycles weave in and out of traffic. And the next amusing thing - most of the cabs were Mercedes! Nice!
It was an action packed week. The first 4 days had meetings throughout the day and "rest of the day" went in updating documents and preparing meeting recaps. I think by Thursday my brain had stopped working. But thankfully I got Friday to do some sightseeing. And that was the only day of the week when it rained!! But that did not stop me.
I think I covered the usual suspects - Van Gogh Museum, Rijksmuseum, Nemo Science Center, Anne Frank House and an evening canal cruise. It was an easy city to navigate. They have a canal hopper - you can take a 24 hr pass for the canal boat. It has 4 routes that runs from 9 AM to 7 PM. You can hop on and hop off at stops. And they also have an hour and a half evening cruise that takes you round the city.
Few observations: The city is beautiful and old. They have a Queen's birthday coming up and so the entire city is being renovated. There are lots of brick buildings that are hundreds of years old. Every building looks as if it is leaning - this is because they all have a hook on the top of the building. That hook is used to haul furniture up the buildings since most of the buildings are narrow to take furniture up staircases or elevators. The buildings are narrow for a reason - if they are built facing the canal, additional tax needs to be paid for the square area that faces the canal.... so narrow & deep buildings! I think the city has more bicycles than people! There is a common joke that the canals are 3 meters deep - 1 meter water, 1 meter earth & 1 meter bicycles!!
The most emotional part of the trip was my visit to the Anne Frank house. This is the house where the Frank family hid from the Gestapo. Eight people hid in a cramped up office space until they were finally caught. No one knows who tipped off the Gestapo about the Frank family's hiding place. Anne's mother died of starvation in Auschwitz. Anne and her sister died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen just a few weeks before this concentration camp was liberated by British troops. Only Anne's father survived. He went on to publish Anne's dairy from their days in hiding. And the rest, as they say, is history. Being in that house, seeing the videos, reading the excerpts from the diary - couldn't hold back my tears.
