It wasn't until we got to Paris that we began to realize the degree to which people willing to line up for attractions, and by contrast how unwilling we were to line up for most of them. There are very few tourist attractions in Ghana and the ones that most people want to see (the slave castles and National Parks, for instance) are big enough to accommodate large crowds (not to mention that Ghana doesn't attract nearly the same number of tourists as the European countries we've visited). Our travels in France prior to Paris we mostly in small places (and in the case of the places we saw while on our canal boat trek, tiny) and still in the shoulder tourist season (it was clear that Saumur was a much bigger tourist draw in July and August and it could very well be that we would have had to line up for attractions had we scheduled our journey a few months later in the year).
But in Paris the crowds were everywhere. Want to go up in the Eiffel Tower? Be prepared to line up, even if it's 10 o'clock at night. The Louvre? Half-hour minimum. Neither of these bothered me particularly because I had little interest in either one. The day we went to the Musee D'Orsay, however, and were confronted with a line up as long as the one at the Louvre was more difficult to accept. What were all these people doing wanting to get into the same place I wanted to go! We dealt with this line by avoiding it and finding something else to do (Paris is great for that -- we rented bikes and made our way up to Montmartre and Sacre Coeur, where we could have visited the Dali Museum if we had felt so inclined, no line up).
It's been in Amsterdam that we've had a much harder time avoiding the lines. It started with the Anne Frank House. I has been there before when I took students on a trip to Europe. My recollection of the visit is just walking in, no waiting (which for the record, is my same recollection of visiting the Louvre on that same trip). What I have come to realize, however, is that tour groups get special privileges and generally don't have to wait in lines with the rest of us ( that realization has made me a little contrite about the many disparaging things I've said about tour groups over the years...). After asking around we were told that the crowds die down after six; we decided to come back then. When we returned at 7 the line up was the same length, if not longer (at which point Alice quipped that it was ironic that there were so many people trying to get into a house whose occupants during WW II would have given anything to get out of...). We cut our loses and went home thinking we might try first thing in the morning.
Today we thought we'd try the Van Gogh Museum. Apparently more people want to see Sunflowers than the house of the Holocaust's most notable diarist. We gave up on that line too (with considerable less guilt, I might add). Sylvie really wanted to see the zoo and when we'd been by the day before, there was no line up at all. It's amazing, though, how much difference it makes being a beautiful Saturday morning, compared to an overcast Friday afternoon. We'd reached a point, though, where we couldn't avoid any more line ups without Sylvie getting frustrated (the zoo, after all had been her choice). So we duly lined up with all the other families (it does seem like you only come to the zoo if you have kids) and the line up moved relatively quickly. We also got a lot more out of this attraction than we probably would have at the others -- Sylvie was still raring to go four hours into the zoo visit, while half an hour to forty five minutes is her maximum at an art gallery (given the heavy nature of the content at the Anne Frank House, I can't even begin to estimate how long we would have been able to spend there).
I am sure that we will have to line up at the KLM desk on Monday to check in for our flight, but hopefully that will be the last one for a while!
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