I’m going to use the theme of this post to show you this picture:

The structure above is an outdoor urinal. Really. You just go behind the screen and pee on the ground. And if that’s not bad enough, it’s right next to the Gay Monument, which they Dutch have unfortunately named the “Homomonument” as you can see by the sign just to the right. Jeez.

Anyway, after we walked by this yesterday, we visited the house where Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding for almost three years during the German occupation. This is where this 13 year old girl wrote her famous diary until the family was turned in by someone, captured and shipped to the gas chambers where most of them perished. Just a month after Anne Frank died, the Germans surrendered. Tragic. We returned to the house today and bought a copy of the diary.

But before we did, we took a boat ride through the canals of Amsterdam. Here’s what we saw.

The canal boats can all clear the 1,320 bridges. That’s one of them, above.

Here’s a view of our captain as we navigate into the main harbor after leaving the canals.

We passed by the docks in front of the Nemo Science Museum (on the left) where we had caught the canal boat five years ago that we took around Holland when we were here with the kids.

A beautiful, huge schooner passed us as we were turning back into the canals.

Several of the canals were lined with liveaboards, some in houseboats, others in barges or canal boats. Our captain said that the dockage permit and a boat can cost as much as €600,000 – that’s about $800,000! (I took this picture from a bridge before we boarded the boat)

There were some magnificent canal boats tied up along the canal.

Dale was fascinated by all the sunken boats we passed, but I’ll save those pictures for a later post.