Tuesday 1st October 2019

No lay in for us today as we wanted to get tickets for the Anne Frank museum. I had tried to book them ahead of our visit but they were already sold out for the day. However more are released at 9 a.m so we both needed to be online ready to go. Our efforts paid off and we got tickets for later in the afternoon.

The weather was a bit grey again with showers forecast and one of the other things we wanted to do was a bit of artistic culture so we headed for the museum quarter and the Rijksmueum. I do struggle with art! Either I like it or I don’t, and I don‘t fully understand why some of these paintings are so called masterpieces! Am I a heathen?!!! Some I liked, of course, but they were in the definite minority! However it did create a lot of discussion between us which is perhaps what art is meant to do!

After 2 hours though we were all cultured out and needed to get out for some lunch (coffee had been achieved on our way to the museum!) We found a really nice little place where we had a leisurely hour and then ambled our way along the canals to the Anne Frank house, dodging the showers!

I had read the diary of Anne Frank as a teenager, and kept a diary myself in those days. We had seen a stage play of the book some years ago and had taken David who was quite young then, so I had a fair idea of what this would be like. However, seeing the actual house, the rooms that they had to live in and the bookcase that hid the access to their hideaway was quite moving. How would I have coped? I didn’t realise that when they were discovered, late in 1944, that they were on the last deportation train. How unlucky was that?

The tour around the house and museum was well organised and respectful and it is something I would recommend to anyone visiting Amsterdam.

Our evening meal was tapas! Excellent even though we were a long way from Spain.