Part One: Amsterdam

Starting on March 3’rd Hamburg had the start of it’s Frühjarsferien (essentially spring break). Back in January me, Karl, and Brendan (two of the other Fulbrighters in Hamburg) put together a trip for the first week of break: Amsterdam for four days, Brugge (in Belgium) for two days, and Brussels for one day. We spent a long time working out logistics and schedules, putting the trip together, planning, etc., and ended up with what looked like a really great trip. When the time finally came we spent the night in Berlin (since our flight took off early in the morning from there), and woke up super early to get to the airport by six.

Intrepid travelers at 5:00 on the subway platform.

The majority of the time when I’m traveling (road trips, backpacking, etc.) I’m usually on my own, which sounds a little lonely, but when you get down to it, it’s actually really nice. I’ve traveled in groups before too, and while I won’t say that it’s ever been a bad experience (we always have fun, and it’s really great to share the experience with others) there’s just a whole different feel when you’re among a few other people. There’s less time to take it easy and really inhale, lift your eyes up from the sidewalk and appreciate what you’re seeing. Wanna sit down on that bench and contemplate the Alps in Innsbruck? Fine. Ride a bike around the Alster in Hamburg in August and find a nice spot on the grass to watch the sailboats? Sure. In a group you always have to come to a consensus, always have to make sure everyone else in the group is ok with what you’re seeing and where you’re going, which makes things a little hasty sometimes, and adds an extra layer of complexity to the whole thing.

Traveling with Karl and Brendan, though, was a serious pleasure. We’d all traveled in Europe before, and had a really good understanding of the do’s and don’ts with this sort of thing—a sense of how to get around and navigate the whole process—which made things so nice.

I never quite know what to expect out of any given city when I visit, but Amsterdam took me completely by surprise. One of the problems with a lot of German cities is that they got bombed totally to the ground in WWII (really apparent in a place like Berlin), but Amsterdam, in spite of the German occupation, seemed all but untouched. Every other building it seemed was about 100+ years older than the United States itself.





Anyway, we got there at the ripe and early hour of 9:00 AM and busted out our patron saint for the trip, Mr. Rick Steves, to do a walking tour of the city. I’d never really used a guidebook in earnest before, but the walking tours we went on in Amsterdam, Brugge and Brussels were all really fantastic. One of the most interesting things we saw in Amsterdam (which we also saw in Brugge) was a Beguinehof (Beguine courtyard). I had no prior knowledge of what the Beguines were, but apparently they were a nun-like group—a very faithful and religious sect of female worshipers who weren’t associated with nunneries or anything. They build Beguinehofs in a lot of cities in Amsterdam and Belgium as refuges from the hustle of city life: places where they could live and pray in peace.

The Beguinehof in Amsterdam was right off of one of the main drags, down this really non-descript, tiny alleyway. Walking in was really breathtaking, it was like someone muted the entire world after walking through the archway to the courtyard. Inside was a wide, open lawn crisscrossed by sidewalks, and around the lawn were the Beguine’s houses, small, white two storey houses with little fenced-off gardens out front. At the center of the lawn was a small red brick church with a bell tower and the classic big wooden gate. The last Beguine died in the 1960’s I believe, so now the houses are used as public and student housing. There was a sign out front requesting that you not take photos to preserve the peace of the place, so unfortunately I can’t share any of my own photos with you.

Another highlight of the Amsterdam trip was the Anne Frank House. On the second or third evening we signed up for a walk-through of the house, and it was really amazing to actually be there and see it first hand. I remember reading that book in the seventh grade and having only a hazy idea of the context the book was happening in, or even the very house in which they hid from the Nazis. And all of a sudden I was WALKING through the secret bookshelf entrance to the hidden annex, climbing the stairs into the upstairs rooms and seeing where the family lived, the pictures and magazine cutouts that Anne decorated her room with, the black curtains over the windows. What really blew me away was seeing the tick marks on the kitchen wall which marked off Anne and her sister’s height as they were growing, Anne was maybe four or five inches shorter than me by the last marking.

Over a canal in the Jordaan neighborhood.