We went to the Corrie Ten Boom house in Harlaam. Corrie and her family were Dutch Christians who helped hide Jews in their house. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to a concentration camp after their family was betrayed. I read "The Hiding Place" again while I was on the trip and was blown away by Corrie and Betsy's faith in God. The pictures show Laura getting into the hiding place through the bookcase. They have also knocked a hole in the wall so you could see how small the area was- I can't believe six or seven people could get in there and hide for days!
Amsterdam was another beautiful city full of canals. I think we were kind of tired by this point of the trip but we were still able to get out and do a lot. Laura and I spent time at the Anne Frank house. Out of all the touristy things we did on the trip, this was the only thing we had to stand in line for. We didn't actually have to wait that long though and it was well worth it anyway! It was very moving to see the Secret annex where the family hid for so long.
I bought a souvenir Diary of Anne Frank that looked like the journal she actually wrote in. I can't wait to reread the book now that I've been to the annex.
“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
My favorite part about this trip was all the laughter and friendship. We laughed so much (we actually woke up our neighbors at the Bed and Breakfast one day!). The two people I traveled with were so great. I felt like I knew Laura and Leslie pretty well before the trip but there is something about being in a foreign land with no luggage for 4 days that really opens people up! Girls, thanks for the fun times and all the good memories! I'll miss you while I'm gone.
Just to give you the size perspective (do you see little Laura?)
Leslie probably won't post this but I just think it is too cute!
The oldest bridge in Bruges
Leslie took this picture while biking down the road. What talent!
Bruges was a really beautiful, small town in Belgium. It had a cute little town square and a belfry that would chime songs every hour or so. There are canals that flow through the whole town. Bruges is sometimes referred to as the "Venice of the north". It was a nice and relaxing town to visit after being in Paris- everything closed around 6pm!
Grote Markt
The Belfry
City Hall
I have never taken a train before so I was excited to travel this way and be able to see the countryside.
And if you notice, we FINALLY got our luggage!!
Leslie kept us entertained by singing some old school Christian songs. I do have some on video if you'd like to see some good singing and dancing!
Scenes of the Belgian countryside as we were traveling. It was very quaint!
After all the train travel, I will say that this was the one thing that stressed me out the most on the trip. I am a bit of a planner and it can stress me out when I have things planned and then something happens to mess them up. That happened many times with the trains. I was grateful for my bags but they were a bit of a cumbrance moving through the stations, up and down stairs. Once you get a little bit out of the major cities, people are less likely to speak English (even though Leslie was able to find people every time!). We missed some trains, had to be rerouted and redirected a few times.
Besides Leslie's singing, my favorite part of the train travels was the fact that Leslie would ask someone at every stop if that was where we were supposed to get off. They would chuckle and say "No, that stop is still an hour away". Good times! We did meet some locals who would point out things on the map for us to go see. So overall, I ended up being happy with the train travels but in the future I might try to backpack instead of carry large luggage!
What at first appeared to be walls built of small stones were in fact huge, orderly piles of human bones. Tibias and femurs by the thousands were stacked neatly, interspersed with rows of skulls, which were sometim
es arranged very artistically in a cross or other pattern. Most of the stacks of bones rose to a height of about 5 ft.
The bones began accumulating in the catacombs in 1
786 because real estate was scarce and the cemeteries were becoming severely overcrowded. The government decided to reclaim the large areas of land used for cemeteries by relocating the remains of the departed citizens to the empty limestone quarries, whose tunnels were at that time on the outskirts of town. The process of disinterring the bones from the cemeteries, moving them solemnly into the quarries, and arranging them there took several decades. No attempt was made to identify or separate individual bodies.
By the time the relocation was finished in 1860, an estimated five to six million skeletons had been moved to the catacombs.
