'Daaaaaaaam, Boyeeeee! Anne Frank House/Den Haag

Hey, you. Sorry I haven’t updated in awhile, but the good news is that I have a lot of pictures to upload (assuming you’re into that kind of thing). As usual, I have a few anecdotes before I get to the pictures:

-The Dutch are very tall people. I think I heard that the average height of a Dutch male is 6’3’’. I saw a couple and their pre-teen daughter the other day, and all of them towered over me. It feels weird being shorter than a 12-year-old girl. Why isn’t this country good at basketball (outside of Rik Smits, of course)?

-I can’t remember if I already addressed the topic of food, but when people ask me how Dutch cuisine is, I respond “What cuisine?” I don’t know what actually constitutes Dutch food. It’s basically a lot of sandwiches. I finally did have a couple of original Dutch food items that I did enjoy. One of them was kibbeling, which is actually just fish and chips, but still very good. The other was poffertjes, which are sort of like silver dollar pancakes but slightly different. I got them with warm cherries and whipped cream. They were reminiscent of “pancake puffs”, which we all love to make in our revolutionary pancake puff pans for only $19.99 plus shipping and handling.

-I went to a drag bar with some people, and it was pretty fun and surprisingly laid back. It was mainly just the bartenders who were dressed in drag, and one of them kept lip-syncing to opera music. I’m probably not doing a good job of selling this experience, but that’s not why I brought it up. When I was on my way to the bathroom, there was a table that had stacks of little placards with various ads for bars and clubs and stuff. One of the ads said “3 guys fuck; you vote on the best.” It’s the American Idol of gay sex shows. I don’t know what you guys think, but my guess is that people aren’t going to that show for the opportunity to vote. Plus, those contests are always rigged anyway, am I right?

-I’m getting pretty tired of seeing gorgeous European women hanging out with douchey-looking European guys. I know this isn’t solely a European phenomenon, but it really seems to be out of control here. I will say that I hold a begrudging admiration for the persistence and steadfastness of European males with regard to the mullet. They are trying soooooooo hard to establish the mullet as cool again, but no matter how hard they try it still looks awful. And the thing is, it’s never going to not look awful. And now they are so deeply committed to it that they’re just saying, “No, we’re not giving up on it.” I think it shows courage and conviction in the face of adversity.

And now it’s time for something completely different:

It is my understanding that signs like these were not there when Anne Frank actually lived in the house. If they were, then I think that would have been a huge strategic error.

But on a serious note, the Anne Frank House was obviously a very sobering experience. It had been awhile since I read the book, so I forgotten a lot of her story. Here’s the front of the house:

You weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, so I’ll just give you some impressions I had:

-I’m not trying to be funny when I say that it’s a little bigger inside than you’re expecting. Obviously, it’s not big enough for two families and another individual to live in, but it’s bigger than the mental image you generate from reading the book.

-It’s noticeably colder than the rest of the building. It’s possible that the museum does this for effect, but I would not be surprised if that’s exactly how it was when the Franks lived there.

-They blacked out the windows in the same way that the Franks did, and so the darkness coupled with the cold really creates a morose mood as you walk through the rooms.

-The creaking of the floorboards made it clear to me that they must have never walked around during the day (since the workers in the office downstairs did not know that they were there).

-On one of the walls, there was what appeared to be an empty glass case. I thought maybe something had been removed from it, but when I looked closer, I realized that the case was protecting pencil-markings that the Franks had made on the wallpaper, designating the heights of the children. I thought that was pretty cool.

-Probably the saddest part of the museum was a video clip of a friend of Anne’s who was in the Bergen-Belson concentration camp with her. She talked about how Anne had given up hope, believing her family and friends to all be dead. According to the friend, Anne died just a couple of weeks before Allied forces liberated the Bergen-Belson camp.

Moving on and keeping the tempo high, this is a church along the Prinsengracht (Prince’s Canal), right outside the Anne Frank House. Apparently, this church was built over the span of 10 or more years. At the completion of construction, they realized that they didn’t want poor people going to this church, so they built another one (which ironically also looks pretty cool) several blocks north along the Prinsengracht for the poor people to go to. I hate it when poor people interrupt my conversations with the Lord:

We took a fieldtrip to The Hague. Our first stop was the Peace Palace, which is home to the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Supposedly, it’s slightly controversial because it looks like a church:



As the story goes, the painter who was hired to do the ceilings had a crush on a girl who did the gardening. While he would be up there, painting the ceiling, he would look through the windows and see her. These four characters are symbols of peace, and he apparently painted one of them to look like her. If that didn’t get him laid, then I’m out of ideas:

A statue donated by the United States:


I don’t remember the significance of this:

Jesus – The Ultimate Arbitrator:

This is the authentic version of something that can be found in every Chinese restaurant in America:

This is the main arbitration room, but it’s currently undergoing renovations:

I thought this was an interesting image to have on a window in something called the Peace Palace, because this mother fucker looks like he wants to kill someone:



These next few pictures are mainly intended for my Mom, but if you like Roman gods too, then knock yourself out:







This is another arbitration room:

Our guide told us that the artist of the large painting intended for it to glorify peace and denigrate war. The painting is incomplete, however, because the artist was drafted and ended up dying in battle. What a world.

I think this next item was a gift from Russia. It’s so heavy that they had to build a special railroad to transport it and reinforce the supports of the floor where it would be held. If any of you are thinking of getting me a present which requires a special railroad to transport it; don’t:

After lunch, we went to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). If you’ve been following the news, this is the location where Radovan Karadzic is being tried:

The ICTY is a tribunal set up to try people who committed various war crimes and human rights violations during the 1990s in the former Republic of Yugoslavia (the best way to sum it up is by referring to it as ‘the Slobodan Milosevic stuff’). While we were there, we saw some of the trial of Ante Gotovina, Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac. The irony is that Gotovina is viewed as a hero in Croatia because he attempted to expel Serbs from the Krajina region, apparently an area where the Serbs often pushed around the native Croatians. Just goes to show you – one man’s self-defense is another man’s multiple counts of war crimes and inhumane acts.

Here’s a windmill!


Not a full view of it, though. Sorry.

That’s all for now. Up next, pictures from Paris.