My time at Cambridge is quickly coming to an end, which is
really depressing! And I am super behind on blog posts, but that is because I
have been so insanely busy! I’ll start with the week after my last post, and we’ll
just go from there. : )
I spent a lot of my week working on my paper for my
philosophy of ethics class, which wasn’t exactly fun, but it was interesting. I wrote about
perseverance as an admirable trait and refuted claims from Kant’s deontology
theories and Bentham’s utilitarian theories. I don’t think it was a
particularly good paper, but hey, I’ve never taken philosophy before, and at
least it is done! Yay!
On Saturday a group of six of us went to Amsterdam. We
caught a really small, scary-looking airplane from the Cambridge airport at
6:00 am, and it took us directly to Amsterdam in about an hour. I don’t really
like flying (especially in small planes), and this one only had 16 passengers,
so I was a teensy bit worried that we weren’t going to make it. But we did!
Hallelujah! The good thing about flying on such a small plane out of such a
small airport is that security was a breeze, and they even had a complimentary
breakfast for us before we left, so that was nice.
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| The super tiny plane I thought I was going to die in. I don't like planes. |
Once we landed in Amsterdam and made it through customs, we
took a train from the airport to the more central part of Amsterdam, and then
we booked it to the Anne Frank house. The line was already incredibly long
though. It wrapped all the way around this little square with a church, and
everyone was saying that it would be a three hour wait. Luckily there were six
of us, so we split into groups of three, and three of us would go explore the
city for about an hour and then come back while the other group left to
explore. This way we kept our spot in line, but we all didn’t have to sit there
for three hours.
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| Part of the line for the Anne Frank House. It went all the way down the street on the left, and then it was really long behind us too. But it moved pretty quickly, so that was good! |
While wandering around, we saw Westerkerk, the church next
to the Anne Frank house. The church’s tower is the highest in Amsterdam, and
its carillon bells play every fifteen minutes. Anne Frank actually mentioned
the bells of this church a lot in her diary, and she really liked them.
Carillons were apparently invented by Dutch bellmakers, so they are
particularly good at playing music on them. Inside the church was an organist
who was playing some pretty awesome Baroque music, so that was definitely lots
of fun to sit and listen to. Also, Rembrandt and his son Titus are buried
inside the church, but nobody actually knows where, which is a tad bit
unfortunate.
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| Westerkerk! |
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| Westerkerk way in the distance. And me. |
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| Inside Westerkerk. It was very pretty and white and light! And check out those organ pipes! So cool! |
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| The sign that says Rembrandt is buried here somewhere. It looks like the plaque in his Night Watch painting. A little sign in front of the plaque said that since he wasn't exactly a rich guy, he was buried in a so-called "church grave," where remains were removed every 20 years or so. So he probably isn't actually buried in the church anymore. |
We wandered along the Prinsengracht, one of the main three canals
in Amsterdam (the other two are Herengracht and the Keizersgracht) and the one
that runs along the Anne Frank House. I have absolutely no idea how to
pronounce anything in Dutch, so I have no idea how the word “Prinsengracht” is
actually supposed to sound.
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| Pretty canals!!! |
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| More pretty canals and canal houses!!! |
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| Pretty canal!!! |
We saw lots of little delftware shops, which was cool.
Delftware looks a lot like porcelain to me, and I actually thought it was
porcelain, but it is actually a special kind of glazed hand-painted pottery
that originated in the Netherlands. It all seems to be white with blue designs
on it (hence my thought that it was porcelain—is it just me, or is
porcelain/China always white and blue??), and there were lots of little pots
and tulip vases and mini windmills. It was all so pretty! There were lots of
little delftware clogs, and I actually meant to get some in Amsterdam but ended
up getting them in Belgium. But that’s a different story.
We also saw some little tulip shops, but they don’t actually
sell tulips. They sell tulip bulbs, and they have little pictures of what the
tulips will grow up to look like. That is, if you don’t accidentally kill
everything you try to grow, like I do. So I didn’t buy any tulip bulbs.
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| Tulip bulbs! I didn't really realize that tulips grew from bulbs, but now I know. |
We finally went back to stand in line at the Anne Frank
House again, which actually wasn’t that bad. We only waited about an hour more
before we got into the house, and really, the wait was totally worth it. The
Anne Frank House is one of my favorite things that I have done so far on my
trip to England and I would definitely recommend it as a must-do activity if
you ever go to Amsterdam. There are lots of Holocaust museums you can go to,
but this one is so personal in a way that not many of the others are. You can
follow the story of one particular girl all the way through the war, and you can
walk through the places she actually lived and hid and see the actual diaries
that she wrote in. The Anne Frank House isn't exactly a house; it is the building where Anne's father Otto Frank had his two companies. Otto Frank owned Opekta, which made jam, and Pectacon, which made spice mixes for meat. He had to resign as director of both companies and transfer his shares to his friend Johannes Kleiman when the Nazis invaded in order to prevent the companies from being confiscated. The next year, the Frank family went into hiding in the annexe at the back of the building. None of the workers in the warehouse knew that they were hiding in the back of the house, but several people in the office staff knew they were there and provided them with food and such while they were hiding. We got to see the movable bookcase that hid the entrance to the annexe, and we walked around the tiny rooms that they were forced to hide in. The Frank family was joined in hiding by the van Pels family and then later by Fritz Pfeffer, so there was a total of eight people hiding in the house. All the people in hiding had to be extremely quiet during the day to prevent the workers from hearing them and suspecting anything, so they could barely move around or talk, and windows had to be blacked out and the curtains shut to prevent neighbors from seeing them. We saw the room where the Frank family put marks on the wall to mark the growth of Anne and her sister Margot, and we also saw Anne's room. She had pasted tons of pictures of movie stars and paintings on her wall, and she even had pictures of Queen Elizabeth when she was a little girl. At the end of the exhibit we were able to see Anne's famous diary and other notebooks that she wrote her favorite passages from books in. She wanted to be a writer when she grew up, and after hearing that people were encouraged to keep journals and personal documents as war records, she hoped to be able to publish her diary when the war ended. She even went back and began revising her diary to prepare it for publishing. Unfortunately, after two years in hiding, the Nazis raided the house and went directly to the movable bookcase, showing that someone had betrayed the people in hiding and tipped off the Nazis. Nobody knows who turned them in though. All eight people in hiding and two of their helpers were arrested, and the people in hiding were sent to Auschwitz. Anne's mother later died of starvation, and Margot died several months after that from typhus. Anne died from typhus shortly after Margot, and she died just one month before the camp was liberated. I always just thought that she had died in the gas chambers immediately after she got to Auschwitz, but she was actually in the concentration camps for about seven months before she died. Out of the eight people in hiding, Otto Frank was the only one to survive the war. He returned to Amsterdam and found that one of the people who had helped him and his family hide had kept Anne's diary. Anne's life had such an awful ending, but her story lives on to inspire people worldwide. It was great to see a short video at the end of the exhibit where many different people described the impact that Anne Frank's story had had on them, and the whole museum was really sad, it was great to see how Anne continues to touch people today.
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| The Anne Frank House. The big building on the right was part of the exhibit, but the entrance to the house was the shorter house to the left of the big building. The entrance isn't the real house either. The actual house is the one next to the entrance to the left. |
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| This is the Anne Frank House. |
After the Anne Frank house, we got one of those Hop On Hop
Off bus tours of Amsterdam, which was a really good idea since it went to all
of the major landmarks and combined sightseeing with transportation. We went to
the Rijksmuseum, which was pretty amazing. We got to see The Night Watch by Rembrandt, which was awesome because I spent a
lot of time studying this painting in one of my GE humanities classes at BYU.
He made use of this technique called chiaroscuro, which involves using a lot of
light and shadow, and I really like how dramatic this makes the scene look. We
also got to see some other works by him, including a self-portrait. We got to
see some Vermeer paintings, a Van Gogh self-portrait, and lots of pretty
paintings by Flemish painters. We kind of had to book it through the museum
since it closed two hours after we got there, so we couldn’t really leisurely
stroll through the portrait gallery, but I think we managed to hit all the
highlights. The museum has a lot of interesting collections other than art,
including some old dollhouses, models of ships, delftware collections, old
wedding dresses, old instruments like clavichords, small intricate ivory
carvings, and some sculptures. I always feel bad going through museums, because
I know that I can’t see everything and I feel like I don’t even properly
appreciate the things I do get to see. Oh well. I guess I’ll just have to go
back someday!
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| Rembrandt's Night Watch |
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| A self-portrait of Rembrandt. I love the expression he gave himself. |
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| A Vermeer painting |
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| This is only the coolest violin I have ever seen in my life. All the delftware stuff was so beautiful. This violin wasn't actually functional, unfortunately, but it made a great decoration. |
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| A really intricate dollhouse. Look at all the detail! |
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| The Rijksmuseum has one of the biggest art history libraries in the world, and this is it! |
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| Some really cool boat models. Ship models, actually. I don't know what the technical difference is between a boat and a ship. |
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| At the Rijksmuseum! |
Outside the Rijksmuseum is the “I amsterdam” sign, so we
went to get pictures in front of it. That proved nearly impossible though,
because you could barely read the words because of all the tourists climbing
all over it. But you can kind of tell that it says “I amsterdam,” so that’s
good.
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| Me and Nicole in front of the I in I amsterdam! |
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| I know it is hard to see because of all the tourists climbing all over it, but I promise it says "I amsterdam." |
We hopped back on to the bus and rode it back to central
Amsterdam. On the way, we went through this part of town that used to be
predominately Jewish. Apparently Amsterdam has been known (and still is known)
as a very tolerant and accepting place, so many Jewish people moved there as
WWII was breaking out. With the Holocaust though, there weren’t many Jewish
people left in Amsterdam after WWII.
We stopped at a restaurant for dinner and then headed back
to Amsterdam Centraal, the main train station. We had signed up for a canal
tour, and our boat left from right in front of the station. The boat was
packed, but we still managed to get some seats by the windows. I had forgotten
that we were travelling during the height of the tourist season, so I guess
that would explain why everything was so crowded and why there were such long
lines for all the museums and attractions. It was amazing to see the city from
the canals, and it was even more gorgeous because it was sunset and we could
see the reflection of the sun setting in the water. We went through parts of
the three main canals (the Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht, and Herengracht), and
these canals are actually on the UNESCO World Heritage List. They were built in
the 17th century, during Amsterdam’s Golden Age when it was one of
the main centers of world trade, and they form rings around the center of
Amsterdam. This was pretty convenient, because eventually you will just end up
back where you started if you stick to one of these main canals.
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| Another random picture in front of a pretty canal. This one is a big one! |
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| Here is the Anne Frank House and Westerkerk, but this time I got to see them from the canal! |
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| A house boat. These things were so cool! They line the canals everywhere. I don't know if I could live in such a compact space, but they are definitely an interesting concept! You can even untie them and go up and down the canals. |
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| You can see tons of bridges over the canal in this picture, so that's why I took it. |
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| Oh look, I'm on the canal boat in the canal with pretty canal boats and canal houses in the background. : ) |
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| Gorgeous sunset from the canal. |
We learned a lot about how Amsterdam was built. Apparently
the city is entirely man-made, and the name Amsterdam actually comes from the
word Amstelredamme, which means “dam on the river Amstel.” Amsterdam was built
in a marshy area, and so people would drain the marshes and channel the excess
water into the canals that they built. Buildings were constructed on top of
huge wood piles, and this is actually proving to be a nightmare today since
lots of the wood is decaying. The trick is supposedly to keep the wet wood wet
and the dry wood dry in order to slow down the decay, but the whole thing is
pretty complicated.
Our tour guide pointed out to us the little hooks on top of
many of the houses in Amsterdam. Lots of the buildings off the canals in
Amsterdam used to be warehouses, and these hooks were used to hoist stuff up to
the top floors. The buildings in Amsterdam have super steep stairs and super
cramped hallways, so it is impossible to move anything around. While we were on
the canal tour, we even saw some guys hoisting a refrigerator up to the top
floor. This is part of the reason why the windows are so big too—the windows
are actually removable so that stuff can be moved into the building through the
windows. Also, windows were cheaper than the stone and brick used to construct
houses, so it was cheaper for people to have lots of windows on the front of
their house.
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| The hooks on top of a lot of the houses so you can hoist stuff up, like refrigerators, apparently. |
After our canal tour, we wandered around the city for a bit.
The canals are so pretty at night when all the lights from the houses reflect
off the water, so we had fun just sitting right on the edge of the canals. The
next morning we took the other half of the bus tour around the city that we had
missed the day before. We got to see a windmill, which was nice since we were
in Holland and all. : )
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| The canals are beautiful at night! |
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| Look at the pretty light reflections in the water : ) |
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| Me in front of a windmill. It's like, the only one in Amsterdam. |
We then took a bus to Brussels! It was pouring rain when we
got there, but luckily it stopped for a bit so we could wander around outside.
I will never understand how it can be pouring rain and then be hot and sunny an
hour later, and then be pouring again an hour after that. We first tried to
find the royal palace, but we got confused and ended up at the Church of Saint
Jacques-sur-Coudenberg instead. Yeah. Not sure how that happened (actually, I
do—the church is located in a square called the Place Royale, and we thought it
said “Palace” Royale, so oops). But it was a pretty cool church, and it was
right by the Musical Instrument Museum, which would have been cool to go in,
but it was closed. We actually found out later that it didn’t even have
information in English, only French and Dutch. So I guess it was okay that we
missed it.
We then got on the Hop On Hop Off tour. These things are
seriously the best. Super touristy, but you can’t beat transportation that
takes you to all the main landmarks while simultaneously giving you information
about them, all while driving you right through the city. We went out to see
the Atomium, which is a big building that is the shape of a unit cell of an
iron crystal, so it has nine spheres connected in the shape of a cube. It’s
kind of like the Eiffel Tower in a sense that it was built for a World’s Fair
and then never got taken down so now it’s there to stay. The Atomium was built
for the 1958 World’s Fair, which is cool because it was the first World’s Fair
after World War II. The different pods are connected by these tubes that have
escalators in them, so you can go from sphere to sphere. There is also an
elevator that takes you to the sphere at the very top, and it is apparently one
of the fastest elevators in Europe. I think it goes around 5 meters per second
or something. There are great views from the top, and there is even a
restaurant there. We actually drove past the Atomium again the next day on our
way to a different site, and we saw tightrope walkers going between the spheres
too.
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| Me and Nicole eating our delicious waffles. |
After dinner we wandered around the city some more. We saw
the Manneken Pis, which is a famous statue of a little boy peeing. I don’t
really get why this is so famous, but you can buy little models of this
fountain EVERYWHERE in Brussels. They even sell little chocolate versions in
lots of the chocolate shops. The statue dates from the early 1600s but has been
stolen many times, so this isn’t actually the original. Apparently they
sometimes dress him up in various outfits too, but we didn’t see any of those.
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| A close-up of Manneken Pis. |
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| Me and Manneken Pis. It's actually a pretty small fountain/statue thing. |
We wandered around a bit before heading to our hotel, and we
ran into lots of little shops that sell Smurfs stuff. Smurfs are apparently
from Brussels, and so is the character Tintin. I didn’t realize that Brussels
is the capital of comic strips before I got there (let’s face it, I didn’t
really know anything about Brussels before I went there), and there are lots of
Tintin murals around the city. There is even a comic strip museum you can go
to, but we didn’t.
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| Look at all the little smurfs in the shops! |
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| A Tintin mural on a wall in central Brussels. |
The next morning we went to the Waffle Factory for breakfast
(yay!) and then spent the day basically just wandering around. There were one
or two museums that we had wanted to stop by, but we didn’t realize until we
got to Brussels that everything is closed on Mondays. Everything. All the
museums, all the sites, even the Atomium was closed. I don’t get why they shut
everything down on Mondays, because wouldn’t you think they would be better of
shutting stuff down on, like, Wednesdays? What about all the tourists that come
for long weekends? But it didn’t really matter, because it was great just to be
able to see lots of the sites. We saw the Bourse de Bruxelles (the Brussels
Stock Exchange), the Royal Palace with its prettily trimmed hedges, and the
Grand Sablon. The Grand Sablon is a large square that acts as a marketplace and
also has a church. The church is a really pretty gothic building, and it is
called the Church of Our Blessed Lady of the Sablon. I was super confused
though, because everything in Brussels is in both Dutch and French, but not
English, so the church on the map was either called Onze-Lieve-Vrouw ten Zavel
or Église Notre-Dame du Sablon. I didn’t realize that everything was in Dutch AND French at first, so I was very confused about why all the streets and buildings
had two names.
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| At the Royal Palace! Usually you can go in, but it was Monday, so we couldn't. |
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| I loved the pretty trimmed hedges at the Palace. It reminded me of Versailles a bit. |
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| The Church of Our Blessed Lady of the Sablon. |
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| The Brussels Stock Exchange. |
Continuing on our tour of the city, we saw the triumphal
arch built in 1880 to commemorate the 50
th anniversary of Belgium
becoming independent, and this arch is in a part called the Cinquantenaire or
Jubelpark. We also saw the Parlamentarium, the visitors’ center for the
European Parliament, which is located in Brussels because Brussels is the
capital of the European Union. We also spent quite a bit of time in the
Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula. I thought that the front looked a lot
like Notre Dame in Paris, and I guess this kind of makes sense since this
cathedral was built in the French gothic style. The inside of the cathedral is
gorgeous, with tall vaulted ceilings dotted with golden stars and statues of
the twelve apostles lining the aisle of the nave. I wish we built buildings
like this still, but I guess they are pretty flamboyant and aren’t exactly an
efficient use of resources and space. Inside the cathedral was also a gorgeous
Baroque pulpit showing Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden as well as Mary
and baby Jesus stabbing a snake on the very top. I don't exactly think that's in scripture, but I like the symbolism. : )
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| Enjoying Belgian fries with Nina and Nicole! |
The Grand Place is another market square in Brussels, but
this one is the most famous. The Brussels Town Hall is here, as well as
something called the Breadhouse (so named because it stands on the location of
an old bread market) and some guildhalls. The cool thing about this square is
that every two years, they set up a massive flower carpet made of thousands of
begonias that form colorful patterns. It’s only set up for one weekend because
the flowers die really quickly, and of course we missed it by one week. The
flower carpet was scheduled for the weekend after we were there. I couldn’t
believe that for something that happens only every two years, we managed to be
close enough to only miss it by a week but, you know, still miss it. Ugh. Oh well.
I took pictures of all the signs that showed how pretty it would be though! : )
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| So these are chocolates arranged in the pattern of one of the flower carpets from previous years. |
One cool thing that we happened upon unexpectedly was a kind
of light show in the Grand Place. We were sitting in the Grand Place at about
ten at night when suddenly all these lights on the buildings came on and
started flashing to music that was playing. It was really pretty, and the
lights would change colors and dance along with the music. This went on for
about fifteen minutes or so, and it was definitely very cool to see. It kind of
reminded me of the Bellagio in Las Vegas, but instead of dancing fountains they
had dancing lights.
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| The Breadhouse in the Grand Place at night. |
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| The guildhalls all lit up at night. |
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| The Town Hall at night. Isn't the spire gorgeous? |
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| Me in front of the Town Hall. My camera had issues focusing in the low-light setting, so it's kinda blurry. |
At midnight we got on a bus that would take us overnight to
London. This wasn’t one of our more brilliant ideas, but it was incredibly
cheap. We figured that we would be able to sleep for the majority of the bus
ride, but at about three in the morning we arrived in Calais and had to get off
the bus to go through customs in order to get back into the U.K. Then we had to
get back on the bus while the bus drove onto a ferry, and then we had to get
off the bus and go into the ferry itself while it crossed the English Channel.
Finally, we had to get back on the bus once we were in England and then drive
the rest of the way to London, where we took the tube to the correct train
station, and then took a train from London to Cambridge. After all of that, it
was about eleven in the morning, and we had barely gotten any sleep. In twelve
hours we had been on a bus, a ferry, a subway, a train, and a taxi, all just to
get back to Cambridge. Like I said, not exactly a smart idea, but we did manage
to save a lot of money, and we actually got to see the white cliffs of Dover
from the ferry as we came into England. We figured out that we were sailing
into Dover, so we ran up to the viewing decks as the sun was coming up so we
could get a good view of the cliffs. They were absolutely stunning, especially
during the sunrise, and that view made the whole fiasco totally worth it.
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| The White Cliffs of Dover!!! Once again, my camera didn't know what to focus on in the low lighting, so everything is kind of blurry. |
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| Still blurry, but you can see the cliffs better! And my hair is blowing everywhere. |
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| The beautiful cliffs of Dover during the sunrise. |
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