We left April 2nd for Amsterdam, Holland, and arrived in on April 4th due to time changes, layovers and flight time. My friend Jeroen picked us up from the airport - Amsterdam International which was huge! Jeroen lives in Haarlem which is a city about 20 minutes outside of Amsterdam. We stayed in his apartment while we were in Holland. He and his beautiful girlfriend Ana were very gracious to let us.
We quickly found that everything is smaller in Holland, the cars, the stores, the apartments, even the toilet paper. The architecture there is amazing, some homes were built over 400 years ago and people still live in them! I took the photo to the right in Zwalla a small town in northern Holland. This is the beginning of a huge wall that they built around the city for protection. The wall was about 25 ft high and 10 foot thick and made of brick. Zwalla is the town where Jeroens parents live whom we visited one of the weekends while we were there.
In Amsterdam, the city was built on water (or water saturated soil) because this over time the foundations of the buildings have shifted and alot of the buildings especially on the canals lean. You really cannot capture the experience of seeing this in photos (trust me I tried), but it was amazing. Sometimes it was hard to believe that the windows had not broken (maybe they had and had been replaced) because of they way that they were stretched. There is so much history in this country.
The photo the the left is a controversially phallic World War II monument titled The National Monument op de Dam (National Memorial) and is located in the main square (Dam Square) in Amsterdam. This is a couple of blocks from Central Station (the train station).
It is a monument that was erected in 1956 to memoralize Dutch soldiers and members of the resistance who died in World War II.
The monument stores soil from all of Holland’s provinces as well as from the Dutch East Indies and if you go to the back of the obelisk tower, you’ll find the provinces’ crests.
Also at Dam Square are the Royal Palace and opposite of it is the famous hotel Krasnapolsky, which you can see a tiny bit of in the photo (on the left) Madame Tussauds wax museum and Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) which was originally built about 1400 and is where Dutch monarchs and other members of the Royal Family have been officially inaugurated since 1815.
