[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent March 2004]
Long time no email, but the reason is that little has happened. As Europe starts to thaw, though, the travel bug starts to kick in, and that means some emails should be swinging out from Edinburgh in the nearish future.
Cal and I are just back from 4 days in the Netherlands. We hopped across Saturday morning to Schiphol, the only destination in Europe served by Edinburgh’s airport – quite an education to see how many places trains from Schiphol can reach inside of an hour. But we were heading to Amsterdam.
Going to Amsterdam is like going back to University. You enter a world that is entirely set up to provide you with excuses to get very drunk, very stoned and very laid. The bare facts of sex, drugs and, er, more sex and drugs are treated so matter-of-factly that you might as well be living in a hostel. And the whole red-light district is really not that different from half-price cocktail night at Zebos. (Non-wellingtonians – Zebos is a prime haunt for underage drinkers in NZ’s capital city. At least, it was two years ago. I might be out of date.) There’s even some serious stuff going on (museums) which you can drop in on for a couple hours each day, before the fun starts.
Of course, University wasn’t like that for most people. For most, as far as I can gather, it was kind of like walking through a carnival with hardly any money, seeing all the banners and watching all the rides and occasionally splashing out and trying something, like say taking a look at the monkey with the head of a fish, an having an even chance it was way less interesting than the huckster out front made it seem.
Where was my point again?
So. Amsterdam. I’m not gonna talk in this email about the prostitutes and drugs, mostly because I didn’t try out either. Suffice it to say that everything you have heard is true, and that no matter how many times people tell you that everything you have heard is true, you won’t quite believe it until you go there and see for yourself.
Instead I’ll talk about the Anne Frank house. (And he changes the tone of the email with a single giant wrench!)
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I’ve still not read Anne Frank’s diary, but I was familiar with the contents – family in hiding, Nazis discover them, horrific ending that is hard to summarize without seeming inappropriately flip. Anyway, in preparation for this visit I read a little bit about it, still not the actual diary (though I plan to, still, yes, I know I know) but quotes and notes, enough to know what was going on and who the people were.
I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.
The queue is long, and the place is full. It’s like a mourner’s procession, or gawkers slowing at an accident, but it’s both more profound and more sinister than that. The participation in the Anne Frank House experience is an integral part of its nature – it is a shrine, now, and Anne’s sad fate has become a conscious and conscientious symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust, and indeed the horrors of human nature. As you pass through the narrow rooms it is impossible to forget that this is what Anne’s diary recorded, above all – the nature of living, as a human, in a difficult world. People getting by, morning turning into night. Her account is both all-encompassing, because it is about every human, and devastatingly unique, because of the specific circumstances in which she wrote.
From my journal:
“I spent the whole time feeling as if my heart had turned to wood and was trying to float to the surface. A strange jolt to come through a door and see the room Anne lived in, all the images of film stars still glued in place on the wall. It won’t be easy to forget. A good thing.”
A horrible place. Another reminder of the black rents the Nazis carved across the continent just a few short decades ago, rents that will take a few more generations to heal – if they ever do.
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Some travel irony for you:
Hotelier in Rotterdam: “I think all Europeans should learn their mother tongue and English. It is stupid that some don’t! I hate the fact that we all have to learn so many languages. It’s those peoples like the French, they are so arrogant, only wanting to speak French!” Name of hotel: Hotel Bienvenue.
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I may not have sent out a morgueatlarge in a while, but I post on my blog every few days now. Getting the hang of it, slowly, although still prone to longwinded political-type rants, so fair warning of that. Currently at the top (March 3 entry) is a photo of me in Rotterdam, if you like that sort of thing.
Blog is at: http://www.additiverich.com/morgue/
Go read it.
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Happy birthday to my dear papa!
Peace to you all
~`morgue