Laying Over in Amsterdam

I arrived in Amsterdam yesterday morning amid the sodden pink skies of a rainy sunrise. I caught a train from the airport into Centraal Station and from there took one of the silly little above-ground electric trams that the Dutch use instead of a subway to the Rijksmuseum. After forking over 10 euros/$14 at the ticket counter, I spent an hour meandering sleepily among blue-and-white Delftware porcelain, romanticized depictions of the Netherlandish countryside, and a nice collection of Rembrandts. Post museum, I meandered more sleepily still through the lovely cobblestoned Amsterdam streets, stopping every once in a while to snap pictures of the canals and dodging sudden rainshowers at every turn. Fortunately I had an umbrella that I stole from the T Street houses when Mike and I moved out, although it was only large enough to shield either my head or my backpack at any given time, not both at once. I tried to alternate for a little while, until I discovered that keeping neither dry all the time meant that both ended up soaked in the end, at which point I gave up on my backpack and defended myself instead.

By sheer luck (certainly not because of my excellent sense of direction), I ended up in front of Anne Frank's house in Westermarkt. The tiny annex in the back of her father's office where she and her family and friends hid out is preserved almost just as it was at the time, minus the furniture. The magazine cut-outs of movie stars that Anne taped to her bedroom walls are still there, exactly as she left them when she and the rest of the annex-dwellers were carted away by Nazi troops to die. To this day no one knows who turned them in. But I'll bet somebody alive today does know, just hasn't said anything about it to anyone, is holding that dark secret somewhere in some country, the knowledge of who betrayed the Frank family in 1944. It seems so unimaginable now, after spending a day in civilized, eminently polite Amsterdam, city of quaint townhouses and canals where everyone rides bikes instead of driving so they don't pollute the environment, that ugly fascism ever ruled here. But yet maybe it doesn't, maybe civil order of one kind can turn into civil order of an entirely different kind more easily than we'd like to think.

I got a delightful lunch at a cafe across the street from the Westerkerk: a mozarella/tomato/pesto/baguette sandwich and beer, followed by coffee, after which I promptly took inspiration from the cat on the booth next to me and fell asleep in my seat, not having slept since leaving New York the afternoon before. I arrived in Cairo last night, cabbed it over to my new apartment with a driver who got utterly lost trying to find my street and deserted me for about twenty minutes at 2 a.m. to ask directions from shop owners, and now here I am. Tomorrow my first order of business is to buy an Egyptian SIM card for my phone; my second is to track down clothes hangers somewhere among the dusty labyrinthine avenues of Cairo. Check out my Amsterdam pictures on Snapfish (see link to the right).