In Finland we are given both Friday and Monday off from work for the Easter holiday weekend. We took advantage of this long weekend and spent our holiday in Holland and Belgium en route from Germany. We hadn't left Finland for quite some time and wanted to see the famous tulip fields, visit the Anne Frank house and see a number of other interesting cities and sites. We flew into the Dusseldorf (Germany) airport and rented a car in order to drive directly to Amsterdam.
The nice thing about this part of Europe is that many countries are
relatively small and getting from point A to point B doesn't take that long.
I had visited the Anne Frank house 20 years ago and have read the famous
diary when I was younger and now my daughter had done the same, so the family
was interested to see this famous landmark and piece of history. We waited
in line for one hour and finally entered the home, which includes the
clandestine upstairs annex where Anne lived secretly for two years with other members of her
family while the Nazis were patrolling around the streets of Amsterdam. I
could only imagine the fear that they felt as they were forced to live like
prisoners while hiding just because they were Jewish. This was a
very emotional experience for me and the family. The museum has become
much more popular in the last 20 years and now gets roughly 1.3 million
visitors per year. Later we strolled around the famous streets which are
surrounded by canals. Amsterdam is a world famous city known for their
architecture as well as their liberal attitudes towards sex and marijuana.
Strolling through some of the seedier sections of the city I could
picture in my head how very different things are here than parts of the
Bible belt in America. I am socially liberal, but would say Amsterdam's progressive social values are probably even a bit much for myself. :)
The next morning was spent in the world famous Keukenhof gardens
in Lisse. This was the highlight of the trip to Holland. This park
is known as the Disneyland of flowers. It was an amazing sight to see; fields
and fields of tulips and other flowers everywhere you looked. The endless
and colorful rows of perfectly planted flowers were a sight to behold and
something that I have never seen anywhere else before. Anyone with a camera could be
a professional photographer in this park because all you had to do was point
and shoot and the colorful flowers dominated the lens. I hope you enjoy some of
the photos we took.
After seeing a bit more of Amsterdam, we headed off toward Bruges,
Belgium making a few quick stops along the way. We first stopped in
Rotterdam, Holland where we visited one museum and then strolled along a canal and
visited an old windmill which is still being used today as a grain mill.
My daughter and I climbed the steep stairs to the top of the windmill
while my wife purchased some pancake mix inside. Rotterdam is a university town
and the second largest city in Holland after Amsterdam. Rotterdam is
also the largest port city in Europe and one of the largest port cities in the
entire world. After that, we headed back on our journey making a final pit
stop in Antwerp, Belgium. Besides being Dutch speaking and a large
diamond city, I really didn't know much about this city in Flanders.
Antwerp is actually a very pleasant city with a bustling outdoor European
cafe culture. Here we grabbed some of our Belgian favorite treats, including waffles
and frites (Belgian french fries). Belgium is known for some food
specialties which include their famous chocolate, waffles and Belgian style french fries.
Late in the afternoon we arrived at our destination of Bruges, Belgium. Bruges is a wonderfully preserved medieval city and also in
the Dutch speaking Flanders part of the country. The country is actually
bi-lingual, with Dutch and French as official languages, though most
people also seem to have a good command of English. I really enjoyed this
city when I first visited it as a backpacker 20 years prior. It is still a
very nice city, but I noticed things had changed a bit since my last visit.
Many of the streets were now lined with high class designer retail shops. Also, the center
had a cheesy traveling carnival and there were hordes of people in every
direction. My daughter and I wanted to climb the famous Bell tower in the
center and had to wait approximately 45 minutes in line just to get to the
entrance. There was a movie with Colin Farrell called "In
Bruges" which came out about 6 years ago and it seems that movie might
have pushed Bruges over the top as a prime tourist destination. I still
really like this city, but it seems a shame that it might have lost some of it's personal charm with the massive amounts of people. Our hotel, which was just
a 5 minute walk outside of the old town, was absolutely wonderful. We had
a large quiet room and the hotel also featured a pool which was great for the
children.
For our final day on the trip, we would make a few more pit stops
on the way to our departure city of Dusseldorf, Germany. We made a stop
in the capital of Belgium, Brussels, for lunch. Brussels is a large city and also the
capital city of the European Community. The main reason we wanted to
visit Brussels was to see the Grand Square which is considered one of the
finest in Europe. It is an impressive square with very picturesque
buildings on all sides. Brussels is also famous for a little statue of a
boy peeing, called the Manneken Pis. We found the little statue which had a
large crowd gathering around it. I couldn't believe it, all this fuss about
this statue and it is so small. I guess they built up some legend about
this little statue and feature it in their tourist information, but really it
is just a tiny statue of a boy peeing into a fountain. Brussels isn't
known for having so many touristic areas and we were satisfied just seeing the
center. Our final stop on the way back to the airport was Cologne,
Germany where we wanted to see the great Cologne Cathedral. My daughter
and I climbed up the 500+ steps to the top of the tower where we enjoyed some
of the views from the top. The Cologne cathedral is a neat, Gothic style
church in which construction started in 1248 and didn't complete till 1880.
It is a massive church and one of the largest in Europe.
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