Amsterdam

Haagen Daz Vanilla Caramel Brownie Ice Cream and I cordially invite you to their wedding, to be held at a time and date to be determined. That is all.

Seriously. That stuff's amazing.

OK I just noticed this keyboard has the following label on it: "WARNING: Some experts believe that the use of any keyboard may cause serious injury." So confused.

Moving on... Amsterdam is almost as amazing as the vanilla caramel brownie ice cream I plan to wed. I already wrote about the Rembrandthuis, Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk, Sexmuseum and Nemo, I think. Since then I've been to the Hash Museum (really not worth the 5-euro admission), Torture Museum, Anne Frank House, Joods Historisch Museum, Dutch Resistance Museum, Van Gogh Museum, Portuguese-Israelietsche Synagogue, Hollandsche Schouwburg (a Holocaust Memorial housed in an office where Nazis used to work) and the Old and New Church. I don't have time to go into detail about all those places because I have a free pass for a canal tour later and a limited amount of time on this computer, but I'll try to hit on the big things for me.

Which means I'll start with the Anne Frank Huis. It's basically as it was when everyone was taken to the camps, sans the furniture. You can walk up the same stairs, behind the bookcase, they used to get to the hiding place, and stand in the common area, which is surprisingly big and bright, although I'm sure it didn't feel that way when eight people were essentially trapped there. Anne's room still has all the photos and magazine cutouts she pasted up to make the walls more "cheerful." A display in an adjacent area holds the original first diary, and post-war letters from Otto to his cousin chronicle his search for his daughters. You read one after he's found out his wife died, and how he's still hopeful that Anne and Margot are still alive. Then you read another from after he's learned they died. A video of Anne's friend, who saw her and talked to her from across the gates shortly before she died, is showing in another room. I really don't know what to say about it, except that it was somehow more powerful than standing in the gas chambers at Dachau. So I guess I'll move on...

If you've been to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. or the Museum of Tolerance in L.A. you remember the huge cases of shoes that had been taken away from prisoners in camps before they were killed. At Hollandsche Schouwburg, they had something a little different -- display cases told the stories of a few individual kids, and sitting there next to each story and photograph was a single pair of shoes, each smaller than my hand. The massive cases full of shoes are jarring because of the magnitude, but the single pair of shoes is striking in a different way -- I guess for the same reason Anne Frank's story is so important in documenting history.

Anyway I'm depressing myself here so I imagine that I'm depressing you as well, and since I already wrote about all this in my journal, I'll move on to art (yay, art!).

The Van Gogh Museum was pretty great -- it gave a lot of his history to go along with the art, and after looking through the collections I got really drawn into the letters he wrote to his brother, Otto. The guy probably could have been as good a writer as he was an artist... it's weird that some people have talent like that and others have nothing. Although he did hack off his left earlobe and send it to a brothel wench, and then kill himself before age 40, so I guess it wasn't all fun and games being Van Gogh.

Well I think I'm going to leave it at that. I was Yahooing something and saw a brief about DeLay resigning, and have decided I really need to spend my last 15 Internet minutes reading the news. It also occurred to me that I don't know who won the national championship yesterday.

My next post will probably be from Hamburg or Berlin... Till then...