Visiting the Anne Frank House

Visiting the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam is a profoundly moving experience. I first went there as a 19-year-old college student backpacking around Europe. Of course I had read the Diary of Anne Frank as a youngster, when I was probably around the same age as Anne (13) when she began writing her diary. Naturally, I was both captivated by her writing and horrified by what happened to her and her family.

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Four days in Amsterdam, the Netherlands

We made a four-day visit to Amsterdam in late May, prompted by my snagging two tickets to the once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer exhibit at the Rijksmuseum. (See my post about the exhibit here.)

Public garden outside Rijksmuseum
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Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum, May, 2023

by Sandra Hutchinson

When Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum announced an exhibit of 28 of Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer’s paintings to open in February of this year, the tickets quickly sold out. International newspapers proclaimed this the “exhibit of a lifetime.” Indeed, the headline of the preview in The Guardian was “One of the most thrilling exhibits ever conceived.”

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