Amsterdam

Sorry it has been so long! We’ve been doing a lot of very little to write about! Pretty much all of last week was spent just walking around The Hague while Grace was at work, or me just being home researching some stuff for school next semester.

Thursday, however, was a big judgment at the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia) where Grace works so I went in to watch that. It was really interesting to see the whole set up and be able to be in the gallery. The families of the two men were also in the gallery, which made it even more charged. The first one was found not guilty, and the second guilty and sentenced to 12 years. Basically it was a lot of cheering followed by a lot of crying. It was also strange because you could tell that it was just bad situations – the men were acting in war, yet probably committed terrible war crimes, so it was just weird to watch it all.

Thursday night was even more exciting. Grace told me that we should get a really late dinner and go walk around or something, so after a long nap we headed out around 8pm. As we got closer to where the restaurant was, I noticed a girl sitting who I thought looked familiar, and she was! Nura had flown in from Romania where she is working for the summer, and she and Grace had conspired to surprise me on my birthday weekend! It was very exciting!

This is me, completely surprised that Nura is there

Friday Nura and I went into Grace’s work to watch some actual trials. They were a lot different from the judgment I had seen the day before and pretty slow moving, and very detail-oriented for something that was so vague and long ago – a lot of research must go into it all. That afternoon, the three of us headed to Amsterdam. We pretty much just walked around to see the city. We went to the Anne Frank House, and then were going to go to one of the other major museums but had lost track of time and they had closed by the time we were done with that. So instead we went and walked through the Red Light District, and in some attempts to get pictures of a nearby canal, got yelled at by some prostitutes who thought we were taking pictures of them.

On Sunday we decided to go to eastern Netherlands to the Kroller Mueller museum, which is in a national park and has free white bicycles that you can take around the park and the museum. When we got there though, most of the bikes had been taken from the main entrance, and were all now in the center at the museum. We finally managed to get some (Grace rode a child size bike =) ) but coming back was not so lucky because all of the people who left the museum had moved them back to the entrance, so we had to walk a couple of miles. That night, they also took me out to dinner for my birthday.

This is from when we were walking around the sculpture garden at the museum

Monday we slept in and just lounged around for the morning. Nura had to leave out of Amsterdam so we went back to see her off. We had about two hours before she had to leave though, so we rented a paddle boat to paddle through the canals. (For those who don’t know, almost all of Amsterdam’s streets have a canal going through the center of them, and they are all connected, so you can essentially navigate through the entire city just by boat)

This is my view from the paddle boat

That was pretty much the weekend – I leave to go home on Thursday, so I will probably take some last minute pictures around here today and post them later, as well as maybe go see one of the museums we couldn’t go to in Amsterdam.

This is a video from paddling - I thought I had gotten Grace in it, but apparently not - you can still hear her though!