Jordaan

Tom, V and I ventured into central Amsterdam using the tram - a super smooth experience that I really loved. The big windows in the tram let us sightsee all the way in and Tom pointed out how the buildings started to get older the closer we got to the centre. We headed directly to the Anne Frank huis as we had an entry booking made 6 weeks in advance on the strict booking schedule. We entered and picked up our audio guides which were really user-friendly. They took us from the warehouse on the bottom floor of the townhouse right through a controlled route through each of the offices, tight stairwells and even tighter hiding space in the annex above/out the back of the building. It was unbelievable trying to see how 8 people in the secret annex even stayed silent enough to not let the people working in the warehouse below know they were there. The most significant thing for me was the original bookcase hiding the entrance, the original posters on the walls and the heights marked of the family which were behind Perspex covers. What I hadn’t realised was that all the furniture wouldn’t be there - I had done the digital walkthrough of the annex when I was younger and had spent countless hours reading about Anne and the secret annex, all renderings of the annex with the furnishings; but I learnt that the SS had cleared most of it when they had been captured and that Otto Frank (Anne’s father) had said to keep it empty upon his miraculous survival and return. I suppose as well the museum would be a lot harder to function if there were still furniture in the rooms as they were so small as they were, and filtering thousands of people through would be much harder if there was furniture as well. All in all, the experience was a big one for me.
After this we found a nice Greek coffee shop to have coffee, hot chocolade for Tom, and explored the city. Tom took us through the Amsterdam location of his university which is the one he spent most time at for his Masters and we met one of the faculty/staff there who he knew well. We grabbed a supermarket lunch at Jumbo, and ate it sitting on the canal in the shade from a beautiful sunny day. Then to something I’d waited 6 years for; a fresh stroopwafel - so good (plus some Belgium choc truffles that were very similar to my fave truffles that I got every year from the craft show in NZ). Yum! We saw the Royal Palace, and the “Mouse Mansion” - a really cute Sylvanian-style mouse shop/mini museum that had walls filled top to bottom with miniature scenes of mice in all sorts of places, doing all sorts of activities. We grabbed a drink at a bar next to the Aluminiumbrug and bought a croquette from the snack wall - more fresh then I thought it would be. And we had booked to see Barbie at the Tuschinski theatre/cinema (a remodelled art deco theatre) which was a perfect way to sit down for a while in air conditioning and finally see the film. We got “iced tea green” and the mixed salty and sweet popcorn, my fave (no butter popcorn seems to be normal here too). V, as per usual, fell asleep in the cinema for parts of it haha, but we all enjoyed it. We took the tram home after the big day; Anne Frank and Barbie in the same day was an interesting choice and gave us a lot to think about all the way home.Read more