DAY 2- Tuesday, April 12th

After I woke up this morning, I quickly concluded that I am not the world’s best hostel patron. I slept like a log, but where you’re staying in a room with 12 other people, 12 strangers, things start to feel very cramped. Due to its unfortunate location and position, to get stuff our of my lockbox trunk, I had to pull EVERYTHING out, which made for a hassle and a time-waster. And of course, once you find what you need, whether it’s your toothpaste, your hairbrush, or your Ipod charger, everything’s gotta go back into the lockbox afterwards. At the time I had the urge to spread everything out and just leave it that way, which, I guess I could have done, as long as I didn’t mind returning later to see all my belongings taken and then belonging to someone else. For a few moments I wished I had my own hotel room, but then I knocked that silly, costly notion out of my head. I would deal.

I walked down to the unisex bathroom and showers, which were brand new thanks to the renovations. There were a bunch of shower stalls and a few toilet stalls, but where were we supposed to change, I wondered. I guess everyone just gets dressed in the shower stall after bathing. I required great concentration when taking my shower, taking great pains not to get my clothes wet. Drying off and getting dressed in those tight quarters was a lot harder than it should have been- I kept thinking, "This should not be such a complicated production- what on earth am I doing wrong here?" I’m just a hostel spaz, I guess. I’d gotten WAY too used to the cavernous, limitless confines of my Izmir apartment.

After breakfast, and several consultations with the map (I can’t tell you how hard it is navigating this city sometimes), I trekked southwest on over to the Anne Frank House. The middle school kids at lsikkent had recently read a simplified version for English class. I had read parts of it back in the day, plus I had seen the Natalie Portman Anne Frank play when it ran in Boston before going to NY during my junior year of high school (back in the dreadlocks and wearing-shorts-in-the-middle-of November days. Boy, was I a nut). There were very few people out front when I arrived, save for a large group Italian high schoolers, many of the girls unabashedly beautiful and glamorous. I got there around noon and I was afraid of encountering a crowd, but I got there at just the right time because there was no line whatsoever. Finally, a lucky break! (When I left the museum later on, there was a gigantic crowd outside with the ticket line sprawling across the whole block.)

The house and the museum made for quite an intense, emotional experience for me. Something about it really touched me, because halfway through my eyes got all watery and I had a lump in my throat until I left. I got to walk through the very house and secret annex in which Anne Frank and her family lived (well, "hid" is a more proper term). You get to go through the secret passage way, climb up the steep stairs, and look out her bedroom window to see what Anne Frank saw when she sneaked a peak outside. Actual pages of her hand-written diary were on display, and they even had Anne’s and all her family’s concentration camp registration cards on the wall, housed in glass cases. It all had a profound impact on me, and I could barely tear myself away once I was done absorbing everything I could from the house and the museum. I was so glad I had the chance to go. I’ve been to the Holocaust Museum in DC, but this Anne Frank House hit me harder than anything I saw or heard there. It’ all so personal, and it puts such a human face on everything that happened before and during World War II. If you’re ever in Amsterdam, you have to take a few hours and check this place out. It would be a disservice if you missed it.

Later that day, I pecked around and eventually found the coffeeshop, Dampkring, where they filmed a scene for Ocean’s 12 (the scene where George Clooney and Brad Pitt talk to Robbie Coltrane in a gibberish code and Matt Damon says all the wrong things). I walked in, got a fresh orange juice (you could see the machine split the oranges in half and then squeeze the juice directly into the cup- very cool and entertaining to watch) and immediately spotted the table they used in the movie. It was occupied by two stoned, middle-aged America couples, so I sat at the table next to them, which was fine by me (KLM showed, you guessed it, Oceans’s 12, on the flight back to Istanbul, so I got to reconfirm everything I just saw in Amsterdam and watch it for the 3rd time in less than a month).

That night I went to the Boom Chicago improv comedy show. The entire company is comprised of young, funny Americans, and while it was billed as an improv show, I’d only half of the show is improv- the rest was pre-written, well-prepared sketch. It was like an episode of SNL that would occasionally take suggestions for the audience, and it was highly entertaining and incredibly funny. I’m usually not much of a laugh-out-loud sort of audience member, but I was cracking up all night long. Again, if you ever find yourself in Amsterdam looking for something to do one night, go see this show. It’s worth every penny. The cast even came out after the show and did an extra 30 minutes of material they’re still workshopping.