Day 38: Dordrecht Day 3 - now with photos

Day 38:  Dordrecht  Day 3,  Monday  January 17^th

Happy birthday Beth – although by the time you read this, it will be well past your birthday.  I spoke to Beth on Skye just as it was turning over to her birthday in Australia, so I know she had a few pleasaant but low-key things planned.

We spent the day in Amsterdam, taking off at about 10am.  It’s really quite strange because to get places here, you seem to have to travel through several large cities – all by train of course, because not many people own cars.  So, to get to Amsterdam from Dordrecht, it was a journey of just over an hour in total, which we broke up with a visit to the city of Delft – of beautiful china fame.

We loved Delft.  It is nicknamed the city of spires and indeed there certainly are many.  Like all Dutch cities and villages, canals abound and those in Delft are lined with houses of various architectural styles.  We hadn’t realise just how prevalent the canals are – just as much as in Venice really, with the difference being that they are laid out in a more organised way and the streets between the canals are not narrow little laneways. 

 

We mainly aspired to purchase a small piece of Delft china, which we knew would have to be small because the price was sure to be large.  We went to one of the last three factories producing Delft china and were pleased to be able to see two painters at their work.  It is the particular painting style and colour which gives Delft china its distinctive quality.  The lady we saw at work explained that each of the factories  has their own distinctive patterns and they each have a slightly different version of the famous blue which they use for most of their work.  We found a very lovely small vase withing our price range so ith great pleasure purchased it and a small bell for the Chistmas tree.

Our walk back to the station took us past a church which has a lean of a full two metres from the ground to the top of its spire.  This took Roger’s fancy greatly and he took delight in finding the many dimensions on which this church fails the right-angle test.  I imagine this is a result of the non-solid subsoil on which Holland is built, but at least for the moment they don’t seem concerned that this church will fall over.

We were back on the train and off to Amsterdam, where our first stop was Anne Frank’s house.  What a wonderful and moving experience it was to see the house which became the subject of one of the best known and most poignant stories to come out of World War 11. No doubt all will be aware of the story of the two families and one single man, all of whom were Jewish, who hid from the Nazis for more than two years in the ‘secret annexe’ of a Jam warehouse in Amsterdam.  The young teenage  daughter , Anne, diarised the experience in such a well written and well considered form that her father was successful in having it published after the war, when he, the only survivor of the group, returned to Holland.  The family was discovered, probably as a result of the Gestapo being tipped off, and they were all sent to concentration camps.  Anne, her mother and her sister were all taken to Auschwitz  and later the sisters to Bergen-Belsen.  All three died of starvation and disease,  tragically the two sisters within a few weeks of the liberation in 1945.

The house in which the group hid was, in 1960, turned into a museum and this has now expanded to occupy not only the house but the three adjoining buildings along one of the canals in Amsterdam.  It is an excellent portrayal of the 761 days spent in hiding: the actual rooms they lived in, a scale model of how the rooms were furnished, short video clip anecdotes from some of those who helped to hide them,  items that were smuggled in to help the family survive, Anne’s actual diary and copies of the book in the seventy or so languages into which it has been translated.  It has all been very sensitively done.  Unfortunately, no photography was allowed, so I will be relying on postcards for my photos of it.

From chalk to cheese, we then walked to Amsterdam’s famous red light district.  This was quite an eye-opener!  I  had not previously  been aware that this is a red –light district with a difference:  the ladies of the night are not standing on street corners but parade themselves like living dress dummies in shop windows!  Even more astounding to learn is that the buildings in which they rent the ground floor as their ‘work places’ are owned and occupied on the other floors by regular Amsterdam families.  As we strolled past, looking with interest but certainly not lingering longer than necessary, we could see that commonly, a premises is occupied by two or maybe three women.  They have the window divided up into little cubicles and each girl stands in her cubicle until, I guess, someone indicates to her that he wants to engage her services.  While standing there, the women were doing a variety of things: some were adopting provocative poses but others were filing their nails, talking or texting on their phones, reading or just looking plain bored.  We could see that the area behind the cubicles seemed to contain futon type beds, but whether or not they are individually partitioned or screened will to us remain a mystery. During our stroll, from time to time, we saw a man come out of a ‘shop’.  In one case, at exactly the same time as he walked through the door, the girl was walking straight back to her window!

Robyn had given me a severe talking to about bringing out my camera and I was certainly not going to take too many risks in doing so.  However, as we walked along one of the canals which define the red-light district, some swans swimming in the canal looked so beautiful that I was compelled to bring out my camera.  While Robyn held her breath and crossed her fingers hard, I caught this lovely image, with the red reflections in the water being of course fromthe girls’ red lights.

It was an hour and a half before we were back at R&D’s again for our last dinner with them.   I had a preview of the work Robyn has done so far on her wedding dress.

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We have now arrived in Bangkok so I will post this for now and add photos later – we’re off to get a Thai massage.