I don't know why but I always expected Anne Frank's house to stand out - its historical importance obvious at first glance.

In actuality, it's so ordinary that I stumbled across it today by chance. It's in a pretty busy part of town along a canal, and it looks completely modern from the outside. In fact, it is modern from the outside - it's just a big museum with an attached cafe and a long line.

Even when I got inside the museum and saw pictures of the house as it was in 1942, I was surprised by how ordinary it looked (and then surprised that I ever would have assumed anything different.)

You would never know something special happened there. It's just another modern looking Dutch store front. Which reminded me that Anne Frank was just another Jewish girl murdered by the Nazi's, and her story is just one of millions in the catastrophe that was the Holocaust. It really put things in perspective.

It was so weird to see where the family hid for two years. It seems nice enough at first, Anne even commented in her diary that it was tough to find such large rooms by the canal. But once you see the space shut up with black out curtains, and read the anecdotes about Anne wanting so badly to see the light of day, it's hard to see those rooms as anything other than a death cell. As I thought about this, and imagined the fear, claustrophobia and boredom, the rooms began to feel oppressive.

This was my first real encounter with something from the Holocaust, and it made the whole thing feel 'that' much more real. Very sobering, but definitely a worthy experience. I walked away with chills wondering how I would ever be able to handle visiting a concentration camp, something I have tentatively planned for this trip.