Day 11 ~ Jordaan with My Daan

Well friends, today Amsterdam really got to strut her stuff. It was a beautiful day in the city, and we have a week of glorious weather to come. And we went to hands-down the loveliest of Amsterdam’s many lovely neighborhoods, the Jordaan.

The Jordaan has loomed large in our imaginations because our original accommodations were based here, after Stef had done some cursory research on the funnest places to stay. We’d flagged a lot of sights and restaurants around here. It did not disappoint.

We started our day at the Anne Frank house. Stef’s been kind of obsessed for the last several months. She re-read the diary, which she hadn’t read since junior high. She watched the excellent Hulu series “A Small Light,” about the friends who hid the Franks during the war. She spent a lot of time on the museum’s website learning about the others in the house. This was hands-down Stef’s most anticipated event in the Netherlands, and maybe of the whole trip.

Sorry, reading public, photos were not allowed in the house. They’ve built a whole massive museum building around the warehouse and annex, and the warehouse that was the public-facing space before the annex holds several exhibits. They are somber, respectful, and hit the right level of detail. After winding through the exhibits, you climb the steep stairs to the annex. It’s unfurnished, as it was when patriarch Otto Frank returned after he was released from the concentration camps. The rooms are larger than Stef had feared, but it’s still very hard to imagine 8 people living in those tiny spaces, never going outside, never getting a break from each other.

As you’d expect, Stef has some thoughts: One thing that strikes me reading “The Secret Annex,” Anne’s own title for her diaries, is what a true journal they are. They are the heart and mind of this kid, and she is very much herself in these works. She started writing as an ordinary kid in an extraordinary time, and was already months in when the prime minister exhorted the Dutch people to keep wartime diaries. She knew she wanted a time capsule, she knew her experience was absolutely crazy, and she took responsibility to paint a well-rounded picture of this world gone mad. And she wrote it with her whole heart, hundreds and hundreds of pages. Maybe she knew what a document this was, maybe she had no idea. But she gave it everything she had, and it’s extraordinary. A writer might never know where their writing might go – it might go nowhere, and I think about the painters we saw at the Van Gogh Museum who have faded into obscurity, and all the exceptional writing out there that has never found an audience. But you never know what’s going to turn out to be important. We need to write about it because it’s important today. The Netherlands may be swallowed up by the ocean, and this blog will have captured the last days of this special place. For all we know, we are living in the last days of American democracy, and what we write about today will reflect the naivete and anxiety of this time. We don’t know what history will deem important, so let’s write about it, just in case it is. It starts with a humble journal.

No photos inside, but here is the building itself! Stef saw it a ton in “A Small Light,” and even though she pictured it on the other side of the canal, she is very happy to see it live.

Nursing a serious case of Museum Feet, we hobbled to a canalside cafe for iced coffee. Revived, we strolled on for a bit, just marveling at the neighborhood. Canals, gables, blue sky – it was an enchanting place on an enchanting day.

Stef was completed entranced by these shutters, which we saw on a handful of buildings:

Frankly we hopped from one eating establishment to another today. We went off in search of lunch, and found a fun (also canalside) cafe with a Dutch tasting board – lots of little bites of Dutch classics, some of which we were glad were only a couple of bites. But yes, we finally had the pickled herring. It wasn’t half bad.

We had the good fortune to be there on the day of the Westerstraat street market, which was full of clothes, antiquey things, and just artful little whatnots. Stef’s favorite was the fabric printing blocks, a technique she’d seen demonstrated in India. She is always a sucker for an exquisitely carved little piece of wood. Coming soon to a knick-knack shelf near you.

We didn’t actually need food or drink, but desperately wanted to see the inside of the Papeneiland Cafe, bringing you food and beer since 1642! This place was fabulous, with Delft tiles on the wall and an upstairs that looked unchanged since 1642.

We walked to the other end of the neighborhood to a little triangle of park that used to be a rampart, with the medieval walls still intact. It was a fun park with a skate bowl where kids were stunting on their razor scooters.

Along the way we popped into three or four hofjes. These are little courtyards ringed by apartments, and several of them remain open to the public on the expectation that people will be polite and respectful. We certainly found them to be peaceful places – and we found one with several cats.

We were ready for a break and a snack, and we made a beeline for Winkel 43. They serve up a legendary Dutch apple pie that did not disappoint.

We did more than eat and drink this day in Jordaan…but not much more. There was a lot of eating. We walked along the streets, up and down, from this canal to that, and all around. We found quiet residential streets and bustling centers of commerce. We saw lots of happy Jordaanians.

And again, time to eat. La Perla Pizzeria was lauded in several travel publications. Without a reservation, it looked like we’d be turned away, but then they gave us the best inside table in the whole place. We got a pie with buffalo mozzarella and eggplant on a wood-fired oven roasted crust, and it was the fanciest pizza either of us had ever had.

Then ice cream just a block down.

Able to eat no more, we headed home. This was the Amsterdam we had been looking for. It was a perfect day in the Jordaan, and we are thoroughly charmed.