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Published: June 11th 2010
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Today was a rather filled day. I wanted to go to Eindhoven and the Eindhoven airport so that I would know where everything is for when I fly out tomorrow. Since I was already traveling, I may as well go to Amsterdam as well, and see what I can see.
The entire morning was taken up with traveling to Eindhoven, figuring out how to get to the airport from the train station, and seeing where I needed to go the following day. It was time-consuming, but absolutely necessary, and much better than trying to figure it all out when there are actual deadlines involved.
I got to Amsterdam right before lunchtime. First stop was the Anne Frank House, which was a better experience than I expected it to be. Not that I am not sympathetic to the Jews who died just because Hitler wanted them to, its just individual stories of a girl who, at least to me, could not write well, just did not appeal to me. However, it is one thing to read about her experience, and quite another to tour her house. Unfortunately I could not take any pictures, so I cannot post any. The hiding place
Anne Frank House
Actually not a house, but a series of apartments, her place starts on the second floor. was not furnished, in keeping with her father’s wishes (he lived through the war), so it was kind of bare in the rooms, but that made it much more vivid and sobering. Of course, the line was long to get in, but that gave me a chance to eat lunch that I had packed. The whole experience was kind of creepy, but the message that this kind of thing should never happen again definitely came across. An entire group of people killed for nothing more than the hate of a couple top men should never happen.
After the Frank house, it was off to the Rijksmuseum. I had acquired a map from the Anne Frank House, so now I easily navigated myself to the Rijksmuseum. As the largest and most probably the best-funded museum in the Netherlands, I was really looking forward to seeing this museum. It was filled with some artifacts, but loads of famous paintings. It is a very strange feeling to see the real painting after looking at it printed in history books for one’s entire school career. Evidently they are doing major construction work on the building, so I only saw a part of the
Rijksmuseum
Definitely under construction! museum that was not closed off, but the best artifacts had been moved there, so I do not feel as if I missed much. The holdings of the museum were quite impressive.
Next was the Van Gogh museum. I knew that this would be paintings only, and that I would probably be disappointed at most of them, but I went anyway. It was rather forgettable. There were some paintings that I appreciated, but most seemed to me to be overly garish, too messy, and badly done. I know I have poor taste in paintings, but that was my opinion of the works after touring the museum.
By then, it was late afternoon, so I went back to the train station and caught a train back to Maastricht. It was imperative that I get back to pack for leaving for Rome tomorrow, otherwise I could have spent much more time in Amsterdam. Thankfully I avoided some of the things present there, but I will have to come back at least one more time to see a couple things that I would like to see there.
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