Day in Amsterdam
Sunday, November 1, we went to church for the first time since Sept 6. The church was in Amsterdam. First we had to walk about 25 mins to the train station and the train took us to Amsterdam. We then bought tickets for the tram and rode a tram to close to the church. There are trams everywhere! We still had about 15-20 mins before church started. The church is in the flower district of Amsterdam so we walked around, looking at flowers. At one place mom asked if we could buy a flower or a bulb to take with us but the variety mom wanted they did not have a heath certificate with it. Here in the Netherlands are certain flowers and bulbs that we cannot buy, because they do not have heath certificates. The heath certificate is for if you want to take it out of the country. If we did buy a bag of bulbs they would be taken from us at the airport and thrown away. The reason for that is, other counties do not want pests and or diseases that might come on the bulbs, also the people here in the Netherlands want to keep the right to their plants.
Well, when we got to church. the people asked us so many questions. The preacher asked us, "You know the sermon will be in Dutch?" We said, "Yes, we guessed that." Some people who go to the church also speak English. That was nice for us. :) Some spoke very good English but you could tell that they had a Dutch accent. One lady who was in a wheelchair spoke good English. She even volunteered to translate for us during the sermon. A lady, Rebecca Osiro, who is from Kenya, also spoke good English. Rebecca is good friends with our bishop and she has also been to Elizabethtown around World Conference time. There was also a couple who was from Lancaster county. The couple knew lots about Lancaster and Philadelphia!
A couple of people from the church had been at World Conference! The one man said that he saw The Mennonite Children's Choir and that we did really good!!!! At the very end when almost everyone was gone, the lady in the wheelchair told us the history of the church and showed us around a little.
The church is a Mennonite church as I have said. It is what you would call a hidden church. The reason is, back when the governments of Europe were persecuting Christians, if the Christians wanted to meet together on Sunday morning, they had to meet in secret. The church in Amsterdam was built behind a row of houses, so that the door that we went into was the front of the church but it looks like someones house. Worshippers would enter the house, exit out the back and go into the church. They called their building 'Beside the Lamb' which was the name of a brewery right behind them. Amsterdam was more tolerant of Christians (Catholics needed to be 'hidden' too) than much of Europe at this time, but they still needed to 'hide' their faith.
It was a very big building inside. There are 2 balcony's and on the first floor there was lots of seating. So we know that there were a lot of people meeting there. The history of the church was very interesting. We were some of the last people to leave!
After church we walked to a restaurant for a little lunch. When we were done with our lunch we started a long walk to the place where we were going to take a boat ride, that boat ride did not have children's audio guides. The man at the boat place sent us down the street to a different place were they did have children's audio guides. The boat tour was about 75 mins long, the audio guides were really bad in my opinion. The sites were nice though. :)
After our boat ride we went and got fries at Crispy King. The fries were really hot and good, especially with mayo. While we ate our fries we walked to the Anne Frank museum. When we got there it was a 45 min wait to get in and it was getting dark. So mom and dad decided to call it a night in Amsterdam. It felt so good to get home again because I was cold from wearing leggings and my ballet shoes hurt my feet from walking around all day long.
After getting home we had cake and ice cream to celebrate Briana's birthday! Briana is 10 now!
