On that Wednesday, we spent the day in Amsterdam, the land of cycling!!! Seriously, in England you have to look for cars before you cross a road, in Amsterdam, you're in danger of getting run over by a bike. A little mention to a friend Melissa Shelley, we get annoyed with cycling 2 1/2 miles to school nearly every day, if you lived in Rotterdam, you would literally be cycling EVERYWHERE! I'm not even joking! When we were walking through the city, there were bikes locked up in loads of places. In most of them, it was like bike dominoes because they had all fallen down!! It's crazy!!
We were in Amsterdam that day because we had booked a slot to look around Anne Franks Secret Annex. The time to look round was 7:45pm. As we had been in Amsterdam all day and had nothing to do for 30 minutes before we went into the Annex, we sat next to a very pretty canal. That's another thing about Holland, they have loads of canals, and they are all so pretty! People even have little canals running through their front garden!! Any way, at 7:35pm, me, Bethan and Edie were badgering mummy and daddy to go to the Annex, and the only reply was 'we'll go in a couple of minutes. At 7:41pm, mummy decides that we should go into the Annex at last. Turns out she had left the tickets back in the van a few streets away! We made it to the Annex just in time! It was amazing to look around the place! If you've read the diary, firstly, I recommend it if you haven't because it's very good, but secondly, the experience of being there is completely different from the book! They still have all of the shutters up to black out the room from the 1940's. I went round the place in awe of being there, but also just experiencing what the 8 people who hid there had to go through. As they were above an office, they couldn't go to the toilet during the working hours incase people heard them, they couldn't eat very well, and they all had to share a 3 bedroom attic between 8 of them. When they got arrested and taken away, the German soldiers had the Annex stripped of furniture, and when Otto Frank (Anne's dad) came back after the war, he wanted to keep it that way. So when we walked in, there was a model of what the place would have looked like with furniture. When we reached the end of the tour, there was a bit about Aschwitz, and there was a very disturbing video on what happened there. There were piles of dead bodies, and some were on fire because that's how the German's got rid of the bodies. I really wanted to visit Aschwitz on this trip, but I'm not sure now. Lots of people have said that's it's very disturbing and really sad, so I'm still trying to decide if I want to go one day!!!
I do think that if you are in Amsterdam, you should go and visit the Annex. It is a really good experience and very enjoyable. You don't just have fun looking round, but you also learn loads! Well, we all really enjoyed it!
That night we had to get back to the campsite really quickly after the Annex, because the gates closed at 10:30pm. We kept losing our way home and just made it. As we turned into our muddy field, we saw that some random Germans had pitched on the side where the campervan connected to the tent! Just our luck! So the van was disconnected from the tent that night! The next day when we were on our way to Belgium, we had to pack up a wet tent as it chucked it down that night. Yes, we were very sad to see the back of that campsite!!
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