Anne Frank house

I’m starting to lose track of days a lot now and can’t figure out why

everything is closed, until I finally realize it’s Sunday.  The group has gone to the Van Gogh museum and Oscar and I enjoy the time while the room is cool, a playground near the hotel and then meet John for staying with the group the rest of the day.  I kind of lose it a little when I head out of the hotel, down those stairs, get the stroller to the museum in order to do some looking around the museumplein which is a beautiful part of the city, only to realize that I didn’t put any Bel Vita cakes in

the bag.  This means that I have to waste the time I have to look around to go to the hotel, back up those stairs just to get them because my child won’t eat any other food.  Why do that?  Because I can get him to eat something else, but it will be chips or something else I don’t want him eating that’s even worse than the breakfast bars and I’ll have to find it and get it 

approved.  So, in the end, this is just easier, but it makes me mad that I forgot them.  I still make it in plenty of time to stop at an Italian place to get a caprese and parma ham sandwich to go and eat with John at a bench waiting for the students.  I don’t like big cities, but I have to say that you can’t go wrong usually on ethnic food in one.  We have had great Italian, Indian, Chinese, and sushi on this trip.  While we don’t have the traditional Dutch food

 at home, we certainly don’t have the others either, and you don’t have to eat Dutch or French or Belgian every night that you’re in a European country.  John says that the new Van Gogh museum is worse than we saw it 4 years ago when they were building the new place and it was temporarily displayed at the Hermitage here.  So, I didn’t miss anything there.  We head off to the Anne Frank museum which is a mess because the tram line we need to take is out, we start walking and the signs are off because they’re built a huge new part to the museum that is on opposite corner and I have to say doesn’t do anything for the site.  It’s a huge black and glass striped building and looks so out of place in Amsterdam, so not in line with the heritage of the city or what happened here.  There’s a café at the end of this terrible tour too, which no one seemed to like very much.  Oscar was told that a family had to hide here from bad guys and was given an audio guide that you had to hold to the wall to start the narration that he could hold to his ear and that was it.  He was happy as a clam to walk through quietly and periodically say things like, “they just said hiding”, or “look him had books here" about one of the rooms.  When he asked why bad guys were after them, we told him we would tell him later.  But the amount of what we can explain to him already and he understands kind of scares me a little.  How will be able to talk to him when he’s 10 and have him understand?  Hopefully a lot because he’ll probably be taking care of his decrepit parents by then.