Many know that Madeleine the travelista shared her inspirations while a 6-year-old that she wanted to “travel around the whole wide world”.
Our very own travelista loves Paris, a city with a lot to like: art, design, culture, gardens, food, history, architecture.
Then, there’s London: yes Paris has buildings wrapped with plants, but London has its white-stuccoed period houses and its beautiful (and intriguing) lower ground-floor flats, yes Paris has its elegant Jardin des tuileries with the Louvre at one end and the musee l’orangerie with its extraordinary Monet waterlilies at the other end, but London has its very own royal Kensington Gardens with a most unique and aptly-named Serpentine lake, the very pretty Princess Diana memorial fountains and a modern art gallery in its midst (we saw a “community-bookshop” there recently too).
But we must mention Amsterdam and its connection with Anne Frank.
While Paris and London may attract more attention, Amsterdam stands out as a capital city, of a smaller country for sure but one that has given the world its first “bubble” (in the price of tulips), the idea of a major city that lies below sea level with its survival made possible only with extensive flood control, and the Dutch East India Company that was a major player behind the growth of international trading (spices, textiles, tea and coffee) between Europe and Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Travelistas would appreciate the city’s international vibes and its reputation for tolerance and openness, the semi-circular canal ring at its centre that was built in the 17th century during the city’s Golden Age, and its doughnut connection, a much more recent invention of the 21st-century urban planner.
We at Madeleine’s are probably not the only people who see Amsterdam as a quintessential walkable city, even the go-to walkable city. A historically more diverse city, in a country that has been more open to other cultures, a walk along its grachten is a most picturesque and very accessible experience, allowing the flaneur the opportunity to admire the narrow and tall merchant houses with their meticulous architectural details that give Amsterdam its distinctive cityscape and atmosphere.
Not surprisingly, it is also a city that has been shaped by its waterways, with 3,000 houseboats bobbing around its waters, while thousands of its citizens require authorities to retrieve their bicycles from the canal waters every year. We’ve learned that Amsterdam has 160 canals in total as well as about 90 islands and 1,700 bridges!
A city, like Paris, that went through a lot of hardship during the Second World War, both being occupied by German forces from mid-1940 onwards until May 1945, and with Anne Frank House (with its Anne Frank statue nearby) today standing right in the centre of Amsterdam as a beacon of the diarist as an important daily witness of events that has historical importance and a young girl’s courage and perseverance to keep the spirits up in the face of persecution. (The diaries were published by Ann’s father, the only member of her family who survived the war, in 1947.)
To continue in Part 2.
