Amsterdam, Day 1

Well friends, I am here in Amsterdam enjoying the warmer-than-the-midwest-deep-freeze-but-still-quite-cool temperatures. It rained this afternoon as I was wandering around the city but it was blowing wind and I haven’t been able to shake the chill.

I’m staying at a Christian hostel one night and then at the Y base for the time of the training that I’m going through. It was so much fun to wander around the streets of a city I haven’t been to before (this is country #21 for me). I have flown through the Schipol airport countless times but this time I actually got out of the Transit Lounge and into the city. Don’t let this disconcert you but the area where I’m staying is right on the edge of the red light district. I kind of stumbled into one of the main streets of the area today while I was out and about with the women wearing very little clothing, posing like an advertisement in the front window of the shops with the triple x on it and the loud music blaring inside. The more I travel, the more I see the best and the worst that this world has to offer. What made me sad was my innate instinct to look away, not make eye contact…the whole escapade leaves you forgetting for a moment that the “object” in the window, is a human being. This is a place that needs Jesus, a connection in the deepest parts of the soul of the people…and because of him, there is hope even in a place like Amsterdam.


As I continued my wanderings I sat down to have a good ol’ European lunch of some cappuccino and a tomato, mozerella and pesto sandwich on a bagette. Yum!

I also figured I’d get out and see at least one of the endless museums that Amsterdam has to offer. I settled on the Anne Frank house mostly because it cost less than the Van Gogh museum (which I still may break down and get to that one too before I leave). The Anne Frank House was well worth the entrance fee. The museum is structured so you physically walk through the house where eight Jews were hiding from the Nazis. You get just a taste of what it was like as you enter the hidden passageway behind the bookshelf, climb the steep stairs and hear your footsteps creak underneath; all the while quotes from Anne’s diary are prominently displayed on the walls reminding you how quiet and unseen they needed to be. At the end in a display case is her original journal with pictures she pasted in, scribbles and pages filled with her powerful testimony to her life in hiding. You can’t leave the museum untouched and passive. This is a photo of the house from the front, although the family was hidden in an annex to this building on the 3rd and 4th floors in the back.


Well, jet lag has settled in and I’m starting to mumble as I chat with others staying at the hostel. I may need to crawl into bunk #6, put in my earplugs and enjoy a goodnight’s sleep in a room with 15 other girls. You gotta love the romanticism of “backpacking in Europe!”