Van Gogh and Anne Frank

In the morning, we took a bus tour of Amsterdam with several stops on the way including a dairy farm where the guy who makes cheese also happens to be one of three people left in the Netherlands who makes wooden clogs by hand. Now, he also has a machine, but that is only because the materials are so expensive and the demand fairly low so he has to in order to stay in business. Everyone really liked the demonstrations of how to make the cheese and how to make the shoes. Most people bought cheese and one girl did actually buy a pair of clogs with her name engraved. Then we stopped at a windmill, which apparently is one of like eight left in Amsterdam. They are so odd and old but they still work. Most of the rest of the tour was on the bus all over Amsterdam, but I fell asleep for about a third of it.

After the bus tour, we were dropped off in an area for lunch, took our picture by the “I Amsterdam” sign and then headed to the Van Gogh Museum. I really like Van Gogh since I did a report on him in third grade art class and I had to do a painting in his style. I really tried to take my time and appreciate the paintings and read all the little paragraphs next to them and went in the correct order. It was very interesting to see his different experiments and the way his extreme moods were clearly seen through his extreme use of darkness or of bright colors. It’s true that he had darker paintings except for the time he spent in Paris and a couple of other places. I think it resembled bipolar episodes, and considering he was in a mental institution for much of the time he was painting, that makes sense. There is a painting of almond blossoms that he painted for his nephew after he was born and I got a small puzzle of it for my nephew. But after two and a half hours, I was done with the museum, so I hung outside in the park for about an hour and then we went back to the same area as the night before. 

We went to the Anne Frank house, which was just as how I imagined it would be. It also seemed so odd to have a museum about the efforts to keep a family from being taken captive in a city that is such a good place now to take captives who are to be used for sex. It was quite a realistic ending to our stay in Amsterdam though. 

Since there were more of us this time, the few that were there the night before were kind of showing the others around. We ate at some bar where the waitress was actually very nice and seemed to have at least a little sense of pride in her work. In fact, Amsterdam has had the best service on this trip, but it still does not really make up for the fact that the red light district is just a few miles away at any given time. I understand that it is an attempt to control things that will probably happen anyway, but it is a very bad attempt. Prostitution will not be stamped out, but it can be minimized, and to me, the red light district is just a signal that they have quit fighting crime and started becoming part of it.

Anyway, as for a last night, this was not so bad. I’ve experienced some odd things on this trip and I have learned a lot, and hopefully one day I will be able to see more of it and even come back to these same places.