One Week

It's Thursday afternoon, 2:43 Amsterdam time, meaning I've officially completed one week of my seven week adventure in Europe. In some ways, I can't believe it's been a week already, but in others, it feels like I've been here for a while and home feels really far away. The last couple days I've squeezed in a lot of what I wanted to see in Amsterdam, and I'm looking forward to heading off to Denmark and experiencing something new.

Yesterday Lisa had class, so when she headed out to do some learning, I headed out to do some exploring. I walked through the market and made my way to Museum Het Rembranthuis- the Rembrant house museum.

I find it so neat that the city has preserved so many original historical buildings- the home of famous painter Rembrant being one of them. It was really neat to walk around in the rooms where he did his paintings, and where he sold them. The museum offered a free audio guide, and I really enjoyed going through the house with it. It wasn't too stuffy or verbose, just interesting and informative. It pointed out things I never would have noticed on my own...like that people used to paint wooden door frames and mantles in a style called "marbling" to make their rooms look more stately. I could've sworn those parts of Rembrant's bedroom were the real deal, but when you get up close, you can see its just paint! Similarly, Rembrant's box bed had little gems strewn about the wood work- just painted black to look like ebony.

In the room where Rembrant did his etchings, there was a young girl, hands covered in ink, doing a demonstration. It was all in Dutch, but with loads of visual aids, so I think I caught the gist. It was very cool seeing all the various tools artists would use to etch into the copper- to see the different kinds of lines produced. At the end of the demo, the girl covered a copper sheet in ink, placed a piece of vellum paper over it, and rolled it through an old school printing press. So cool to see a beautifully constructed drawing come out on the other end.

The rest of the house was interesting as well, particularly a room where Rembrant kept his "natural collections". Things like seashells, corral and various stones. Weird. But cool, and apparently a thing back then. Meant you were worldly I suppose.

My plan had been to do the "Jewish Quarter" walk from my Frommer's book that day, but I was meeting Lisa for lunch and knew I wouldn't have enough time at the next stop on the walk- another museum. Instead, I walked in the general direction of her campus, admiring canals and cute storefront displays along the way.

When I reached our meeting place - a "Coffee Company" on a corner, I hunkered down and did some journaling while gazing out the window. Everything here is so pretty.

I hung out with Lisa and her classmates for a couple hours, enjoying a super yummy (and super cheap!) bowl of tomato soup from the school caf.

When Lis went back to class, I finished up the end of the Jewish Quarter walk. This involved visiting the Dock Worker's memorial and the Auschwitz Memorial.

When the deportation of Dutch Jews began in February of 1941, the dock workers went on strike in protest. It was the only protest of its kind in all of occupied Europe and was quickly and heftily crushed. In Jonas Daniël Meijerplein, very close to Lisa's place, a bronze statue stands in memory of this rare act of resistance against the Nazi regime.

Nearby, just a few blocks away really is a teeny-tiny little park that houses the memorial for Dutch Jews who lost their lives in Auschwitz. It's a very unassuming thing. You may not even notice it's there if you weren't looking for it. But boy. What a powerful statement the artist Jan Wolkers made in designing this memorial.

In my last year of uni, I took a contemporary lit class on Holocaust literature. It was understandably an incredibly heavy class, but also one f my favourites out of my whole degree. For my final paper in that class, I did a pretty overarching thing, looking at sky imagery as it relates to the Shoah in practically my whole syllabus, which included novels, poetry and a collection of short stories. I looked at a few different ways the sky is represented in this challenging and emotional genre. I'm not going to argue my thesis on a blog spot post, but I basically looked at how the sky could be viewed as a symbol for humanity, and how the fact that the sky remained the same as always during the Holocaust is problematic.

Maybe Wolkers read my paper. No, obviously he didn't. But he seemed to be working with the same idea. An explanatory note alongside the memorial discusses how the sky remained expansive and beautiful "as if over a field of flowers", which atrocities were being committed below. To dispute this, Wolkers covered the ground where urns of ashes from Auschwitz lie in Dutch soil with six panels of broken mirrors. In this space, never again will the sky appear unbroken, unblemished. Instead, it will reflect the pain and destruction it impossibly should have in WWII. "Nooit Meer Auschwitz" reads the inscription. Never again Auschwitz.

Lisa and I made gnocchi for dinner last night, and watched a couple movies with Frank and Jenny. Today is a gross rainy day. I've spent almost all of it inside. This post is already really long, so I'll keep you in suspense and tell you about my day later.