Amsterdam -- Part 2

Tuesday morning it was lightly raining, but we decided to go to the Royal Artis Zoo zoo anyway.  We were nearly ready to walk out the front door when Sam puked his breakfast all over me.  Being a parent is such a joy!  It was back to the tub for both of us.  Even after that little interlude, we still made it to the zoo shortly after they opened and were able to spend several hours there.  In fact, we spent far more time there than we expected to!  For a park that only covers a couple city blocks, it is an amazingly complex place with lots of incredible habitats to wander around.  The environments were very clean and appropriate to the species they housed and I only saw one animal that was showing the standard caged animal distress signs of pacing and agitation.  (A pheasant.  His enclosure was near where some construction was going on.)  What impressed us the most was how many babies there were.  Obviously, the animals are not breed if they don't feel completely comfortable.  There were three baby gorillas, at least that many in a different primate habitat, a baby elephant, lots of pelicans and swans minding nests, and even more besides!

I was probably most awestruck in the butterfly house.  I know butterflies don't generally live all that long once they become butterflies, so how do they conspire to have a constant supply of breathtaking beauty fluttering around?! 

This was the look on my face pretty much the whole time I was in there.  And it wasn't just for the butterflies, even though they were the main attraction.  The rainforest plants just as remarkable as the insects.  There were orchids and a banana tree and things I didn't even know what to call, other than beautiful!  Here are a few more butterfly pictures just because I liked them so much:

The Royal Artis Zoo has some standard animals that every zoo seems to have, like elephants and giraffes, but most of their animals were ones that I had not seen before, mostly from southeast Asia and South America.  Jerry and I thought about it and decided that this is probably because of the Dutch history of travel to and trade with those areas.  The Royal Artis is the oldest Zoo in Europe and has its roots deep in the seafaring nature of The Netherlands.  It was a most remarkable place.

European vulture

Asian elephants

And now for something completely different.

As most people know, Amsterdam is the city in which Anne Frank and her family lived and hid during the war.  I knew that I wanted to walk through the Secret Annex as part of my trip to Amsterdam.  I wanted to feel the reality of her writings in a deeper way by being in the rooms where she had actually written them.  So we stood in a long line, that moved faster than we expected, and paid a few Euros for the privilege of experiencing the Anne Frank Museum.  It is a museum and not a house.  The rooms are bare except for the displays of a few artifacts that are still surviving.  I felt closest to the people who had hid there in Anne's bedroom because there are still some of the movie star pictures that she put up pasted to the walls.  I reread her book in preparation for going to the museum, and I am glad I did because it allowed me to imagine with so much more accuracy what it really was like in that small apartment during WWII.

To be continued....