I leaned over to MoD and said MoD, MoD! we are sitting in Amsterdam! In a coffee shop.

It feels surreal.

A little like my life right now.

This morning we headed off to the Plantage District to take in The Resistance Museum.

Today its each to his own (as a couple) – the group all going their own seperate ways. We will meet later for a meal.

On our way we stopped into a bike shop and got one of those nifty bike locks I had been eyeing off at the market the other day. They attach to your back tyre.

Our tickets to the Resistance Museum were for 10am so with half hour to wait we popped into the De Deli Cafe for coffee and a quick breakfast.

Although quick wasn’t in the vocabulary.

The lovely lady laughed when I asked if they had soy. Being an Aussie, naturally I gave her a bit of curry on that one. Seems soy is out and oat is in. Gross. I opted for a cows milk cappuccino- a test to see if it bothers my stomach nowadays.

It did not.

So now I have options even though cows milk is no soy. Having said that, the coffee was very nice and the breakfast was amazing.

I had been keen on going to The Holocaust Museum, however it only opened last week and tickets are already sold out until March 18.

Pays to purchase in advance.

We enjoyed the Resistance Museum albeit a little confronting. Like most history. The map below shows the data the Germans used to capture the Jewish residents. Public officials in Amsterdam used the registration data to create the map at the request of the Germans in May 1941. Each dot represented ten Jewish residents. From memory there were 107,000 Jewish residents captured by the Germans. Only 5000 returned from the camps. Unbelievably tragic.

I spent quite some time watching a video, where we had an insight into the effect of this horrible time in the history of Amsterdam. I took pictures of each statement because every word felt totally relevant.

After that, it was a quick lunch break – yes I am going to share my pic of the most amazing pumpkin pancakes ever…..

…and then it was off to the Museum Quarter to see the Van Gogh Museum. The most popular attraction in this city. Not exactly loving Van Gogh’s work (sorry Van Gogh fans). We didn’t stay long. Long enough for MoD to open his water bottle in the gallery, not realising it contained sparkling water, and having it spray across the room. He promptly cleaned it up to the delight of the onlookers. This is the cleaned up version. We made our mark. And then left.

On the way to Van Gogh, just in the street, we had met Julie and Gary. What are the odds in a city of over 800,000 people? We also passed the Zoo (I took a pic of the pink flamingos) and a few cool gardens, which of course I must share.

And then it was time for the Anne Frankhuis. Julie, Adam, Julie and Gary met us there. Brian and Ann had previously been. This experience is something I had been looking forward to and had consistently checked the website (every few days) for months to make sure as soon as bookings opened for our nominated day we could get tickets.

When you book a museum experience here they give you a time and you queue up about five minutes before your allotted time. It’s very orderly. When we got there the queues were huge but as we had also booked the introductory tour, we queued in another line. There were only about 25 in the group. The tour guide took us through the history of the family for about 30 minutes, very interesting and of course it meant when we did walk through the house there weren’t too many people.

As expected it was an extremely interesting, confronting and somber experience. The Anne Frank Diary was what sparked my interest, when I was a teenager, on the events of the Holocaust and the atrocities of WWII. The horror these people went through can never be forgotten. It would be nice if the world could just learn from this.

Apparently not when you see what’s actually going on int he world right now.

After that we all headed back to meet Ann and Brian before heading off for a Thai meal. As you do in Amsterdam. The local cuisine is actually Indonesian but we haven’t as yet tried that.

We still have two days.