Amsterdam and the Netherlands - In which I connect with my roots

Arriving in Amsterdam was a surreal experience. As soon as I got off the plane, I suddenly no longer felt like the tallest person in the room, something I had gotten used to living in Spain for the past couple of months. Suddenly almost everyone was my height or taller, and almost everyone looked somewhat like someone who I had gone to high school with or that I had met at church. The language was different, yet not so different that it felt foreign, and although stepping out of the plane brought me to a world that I had never experienced, it all felt oddly homey. 

The unfortunate thing was that the weather while we were in Amsterdam was not spectacular. It was cold and rainy and pretty windy. This actually manage to make it feel even more like home. However, even the awful weather could not disguise the beauty of these streets, with the different types of roof tops and the sea of bikes lining every canal.

An unexpected highpoint were the many cafes. Fresh mint tea, carrot cake, pannekoeken, and not local things like Belgian waffles all stole my heart as mom and I took shelter in the gorgeous little cafes when the wind and cold became too much. With every cafe we visited, I became more and more convinced that even though the intrepid Dutch have to ride their bikes in such cold and blustery weather, they must still have it pretty good if at the end of the journey they can end up in one of these adorable holes in the wall.

Speaking of holes in the wall, we accidentally stumbled our way into a quite little passage off of Spui leading to Begijnhof, which is a quiet little residential area around a gorgeous courtyard. It is so peaceful and charming here that you forget that the city is outside, bustling with life.

After a couple of days in Amsterdam, we were lucky enough to go to Friesland to visit some relatives who we had never met before. Although Amsterdam is cool, this was definitely the highlight of the trip. It was such a pleasure to get to experience Dutch culture through the eyes of those who live there and to get to know such kind and generous people better. Driving through the countryside of Friesland was a rare treat that I feel many people don't get to experience when they just stop in Amsterdam.

We took some time to visit Westerbork because my family on my Grandpa's side was Jewish. Although my direct ancestors immigrated to America, all of the remaining family was shipped out of Westerbork to concentration camps, mostly Auschwitz, during WWII. I wasn't sure what to expect when we got there. There was very little left to see, the only original building the admirals house, covered in glass as if framing a moment in history while isolating us from the true experience of the camp, the only original building that of the oppressors, not the victims of this period of history.

The letters people wrote to family before they were shipped out of Westerbork to other concentration camps were particularly poignant. We were lucky to have people who could translate these heartbreaking letters to us.

The memorial there consisted of little bricks for each person who had passed through Westerbork, the size of the brick representing the age of the person when they died in the concentration camps. The places where there seem to be holes in the photo below are actually very short bricks, representing babies. The larger ones grandparents and elders of the town.

We got one last day in Amsterdam before returning to Spain. Although Amsterdam was much more full of life that last day as the weather had gotten a lot better, Mom and I both already missed our family in Friesland and were sad to have to leave a place that was already beginning to feel so much like a home we instinctively recognized somewhere in our DNA. Yah, sounds schmoozy, but as we walked through the streets of Amsterdam we went over Dutch and Frisch words we had learned with our relatives. The last day, we traveled to a couple different places, covering areas of Amsterdam that we previously hadn't spent a lot of time in. Somehow we ended up following these two performers around the city, bumping into them in multiple places. They exuded such excitement and life that I couldn't help but smile every time we encountered them again. And with the image of them in my head, I got on the plane, and flew back to Spain, where I stepped into the airport and felt like a giant once more.