Wonderfully Weird: Legos, Doorbells, and Anne Frank

Imagine getting your hands on 25 million Lego bricks — a virtually unlimited supply. What would you build?

I had high hopes for the Lego House in Billund, Denmark. Not only was I eager to write up the experience for the next edition of our Rick Steves Scandinavia guidebook; as someone who grew up playing with Legos, I figured I’d also enjoy it. What I did not expect was an epiphany about human nature. But then, travel is all about the joy of unexpected discovery.

The Lego House is a giant white structure in the middle of a small park in the center of Billund — just up the street from where Ole Kirk Christiansen started his wooden-toy business in 1932. The building looks like it was built from (you guessed it) Legos. Inside, the 50-foot-tall “Tree of Creativity” — made of 6.3 million bricks, its boughs supporting delightful creations — rockets up through the atrium.

Curling up the staircase, you arrive at the Masterpiece Gallery to learn about the AFOL (“Adult Fans of Lego”) community, who specialize in assembling MOCs (“My Own Creations”). These wildly inventive sculptures — which break free from the rigid architectural plans that come with any Lego set — are displayed throughout the Lego House, each one labeled with its creator, who come from all over the world.

From this central hub, the Lego House’s exhibits are organized into “experience zones” that are color-coded to emphasize different qualities that Lego play can bring out: green for socialization; blue for cognitive skills; red for creativity; and yellow for emotional intelligence.

When evaluating sights like this for our guidebooks, I tend to approach them with a healthy skepticism, verging on cynicism. (Are you familiar with my thoughts on Salzburg’s Sound of Music tours?) And it struck me as pretty bold for a plastic plaything to make such lofty claims… covering so many developmental bases in one fell swoop. Was this attraction merely a money-grubbing incarnation of crass corporate commercialization — a massive come-on to hoodwink kids and their parents into sinking even more cash into their Lego collections?

And yet, as I wandered from zone to zone, I found myself completely won over. It wasn’t just the hands-on activities in each section — for example, creating your own “animal with emotions” to upload and dance on a giant screen; or designing and testing a race car at the test track; or the remarkably detailed model of a gigantic city packed with fun-to-scrutinize details and fascinating Easter eggs. (Though I will admit, that was pretty cool.)

No, more than the “exhibits,” what got to me were the people. Huddled around the base of an 18-foot-tall waterfall of multicolored bricks — immersed in a sea of Legos — were people playing, people building, people laughing, people enjoying.

And those people — like the bricks they were stacking together — came in every conceivable type. They were young and old, they were rich and poor, they were Europeans and Americans and Indians and Chinese and Africans… a United Nations of humanity, all playing side-by-side, like a real-life Benetton ad or a Sesame Street teachable moment. Suddenly, I found myself touched to consider how many millions of people, around the world, grew up playing with the same toys I did.

Looking back on my own childhood, I remember how I adored my Legos. I could spend endless hours stacking and unstacking them, creating my own buildings and spaceships and dioramas. Today, I have friends who still build elaborate Lego sets (a COVID-era hobby that never went away); and I also have a pair of young nephews who count Legos among their favorite toys. Something about this “simple plaything” is far from simple, and seemingly universal.

But… why?

I think it’s because life is incredibly difficult, even for kids. (Especially for kids.) Every day, we’re told what we can’t do and say and feel. And we’re not always equipped with the tools we need to grapple with those hard realities of existence. Lego provides those tools, letting us use them in whatever way we find most helpful in that moment — whether that means engineering elaborate and detailed constructions, or going wild with rule-breaking creativity, or just scattering them around the room like a spring rainstorm… for an unassuming parent to step on in the middle of the night.

There’s a reason kids love Legos — and why people who want to better understand kids also love Legos. My mother, a retired clinical psychologist who often worked with children, could learn a lot from what a young patient built with their Legos, and how they built it, and what they had to say about their creation. Legos are the Rorschach Test of our time: You can make anything. So… what do you want to make?

Another thing I noticed, as I toured the exhibit, was that the Lego House was filled with misfits… oddballs… quirky characters. Some were merely socially awkward, shy, pushy, a little too excited; others appeared to have physical or developmental disabilities. I was suddenly very aware that everything here was designed to be accessible to all. And I watched many visitors taking full advantage of those adaptations, having the absolute time of their lives, with no regard for what a clueless observer like me might see as a “limitation.” They could simply be themselves and be in the moment, enjoying the vibrant mountains of Legos along with everyone else.

Of course, I’m an oddball too — someone who spends a hundred days each year far from home, wandering around Europe, obsessing over making guidebooks flawless. I get disproportionately excited by collecting and sharing arcane tidbits with my readers. (For example, did you know “Lego” stands for LEg GOdt, Danish for “play well”? And that it also means “I put together” in Latin — but that’s sheer coincidence?) When I’m in the middle of an intense research trip, I get jazzed about heading back to my hotel for a couple of productive hours writing on my laptop — which sounds so much more appetizing a fancy dinner. Weird!

But then, each of us is “weird’ in our own wonderful way, aren’t we? Think about it: Have you ever met someone who was actually “normal”? And if so, how long did it to take you to figure out that they, too, had their quirks: an unusual hobby, an inexplicable obsession, a hard-to-explain fetish, a problematic sense of humor, a hang-up that only they could fully understand? Sometimes, the more “normal” they try to seem, the weirder they are.

And so there I was, a weirdo surrounded by fellow weirdos — united, and comforted, in our collective weirdness — each of us drawn to those heaps of multicolored plastic bricks. And we were given access to 25 million of them to create whatever we could possibly imagine… each of us empowered to make an “MOC” (or several) all our own. Imagine: No two creations will ever be the same… and not a single one will ever be boring. How staggeringly human!

So then: What did I build? I must admit: nothing. I was too busy scurrying around, taking notes, thinking about how I’d describe this place in our guidebook, pondering my own childhood and the universal appeal of Legos, and watching the clock tick down until I had to leave… if I wanted to squeeze in the other sights on my itinerary.

Wait, what?! You went all the way to Lego House, had access to millions of Legos, and didn’t build a thing?

I know… weird, right?

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My Lego House experience reminded me of a similar epiphany I enjoyed during a visit last spring to Amsterdam. I was walking along a residential street, several blocks from the touristy canals of the historical center, when a bank of doorbells stopped me in my tracks.

Instead of adhering to a standardized template for this building’s buzzers, each resident had provided their own nameplate, with their own idiosyncratic flair. And each one was as individual as the person it represented.

Scanning those nameplates, I could really imagine the face of a human being behind each one. It wasn’t just a list of names; the irregularity of the labels embodied how this building contained an eclectic mix of personalities, hopes, dreams, tastes, dislikes, desires, fears, and, yes, weirdnesses.

Later that week, in the former shipyard-turned-hipster-hotspot of NDSM, another sight grabbed my attention: A glorious, several-stories-high street art mural of Anne Frank.

What struck me wasn’t just the medium — spray paint on the side of a building, casting a patchwork of colorful rectangles on Anne’s smiling face, instead of a black-and-white photograph. It was also the message: “Let me be myself.”

Of course, that’s precisely the story of Anne Frank: She was a young girl with a big personality and an exuberantly complicated inner life, forced to hide away in a secret annex because she also happened to be Jewish — at time when her city was occupied by an antisemitic, fascistic regime.

In our cynical, overheated, politicized age, people roll their eyes at ideas like “tolerance” and “letting people be themselves.” But the cautionary tale of Anne Frank — and the 102,000 other Dutch Jews murdered in the Holocaust — reminds us of the stakes of intolerance. Everyone, regardless of their politics, loves Anne. We love Anne because she dreams so big, beyond the walls of her tiny annex; she deserved a bigger space in which to not only dream, but to live out those dreams. To be herself. What would Anne have made with all those Legos, if she’d lived long enough to see them?

The Dutch learned some hard lessons from World War II and the Holocaust, and from the centuries of Catholic-versus-Protestant carnage that preceded it. That’s why Amsterdammers, quite famously, go out of their way to let people be themselves. For example, in 2001, the Netherlands was the first nation in the world to recognize same-sex marriage. (They’re in good company: Denmark, the birthplace of Lego, became the very first nation to grant legal rights to same-sex partnerships in 1989.) It’s also why this city is synonymous with decriminalized marijuana and legal sex work. Amsterdam is built upon a live-and-let-live ethos, which is rooted in agonizing historical lessons that doing the opposite ends in tragedy.

Another thing that strikes visitors to today’s Amsterdam is its diversity. Strolling the canals, you see people from every imaginable background sharing a stunning 17th-century city that was built on profits from colonial exploitation and the transatlantic slave trade. This complicated heritage is another reason the Dutch are determined to do better.

Amsterdammers like each other, or don’t like each other, as individuals. I imagine the people represented by all those doorbell nameplates don’t always get along. But they always accept each other’s right to exist.

Consider another Amsterdam icon, the tulip: It begins life as a knotty, ugly, dirty bulb. It looks like a misshapen tumor… something you want to bury deep in the ground, if only so that you never have to see it again. But then, with proper care, it sends up a green shoot. And when it opens up, you never know quite what color and shape its petals will take — but it’s always beautiful.

That’s why, upon visiting Denmark’s Lego House — where toddlers and kids and teens and adults and seniors from around the world convene to play with millions upon millions of colorful bricks, each building their own creations that could only be built by them — I found myself thinking about Dutch doorbells, Anne Frank, and knotty tulip bulbs.

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We live in an uncertain, often unnerving time, when the political pendulum swings to dizzying extremes, and it often feels the ground is shifting beneath our feet. Perhaps understandably, we’re turning on each other: reducing one another to a political talking point, a red baseball cap, a nationality, an immigration status, a long-ago misstep or misstatement. There are powerful forces in our society that stand to benefit from this divisive trend — in fact, they’re counting on it, because it distracts us from our shared humanity and overlapping values.

But travel is the antidote to all of that. Whether you lose yourself while building with endless Legos, or learn about the cautionary tale of Anne Frank, or pause to enjoy the tulips, or simply find yourself pondering a random row of doorbells, travel reminds us that — in the end — we’re all just people: beautifully different, wonderfully weird people.

On my last train ride in Denmark, I noticed a sign in the window — a piece of instruction for passengers. The message was not “No smoking” or “No feet on the seats” or “If you ride without a ticket, we’ll fine you.” It was simply this:

It’s a simple request — but there’s so much behind it. Consideration feels in short supply these days; it’s a privilege and an inspiration to spend some time in a society that still values it.

Consideration means treating one another with respect, even when we disagree, and extending one another the benefit of the doubt. Consideration means letting people be themselves. Consideration means making sure everyone gets a chance to play with the Legos — because you never know what wonderfully weird things they might create.