Our first cultural stop was the Van Gogh museum, which was definitely one of my favorite museums of the whole trip. By being focused and telling a story, they really cast Van Gogh’s life into romantic relief, and his short artistic cycle, tumultuous life, early demise, and subsequent ‘post-mortem’ elevation to modern master is as interesting as his art. We spotted a couple of his paintings we really liked, notably ‘the harvest’ and ‘sunflowers’. We may try to get prints of some of these for our house. We spent a good several hours there, just looking at paintings and reading Van Gogh’s life story. One of my highlights.
No pictures allowed, so here is *the* portrait of Van Gogh that, ironically, we saw in the Orsei Museum back in Paris.
In between that stop and our next, we ate lunch at some open-air restaurants between the two museums we’d be visiting. We had another belgian waffle (they’re so good!) and sandwiches, and then spent some time browsing a collection of oil reproductions of Van Gogh’s work. I came close to getting some, but the details weren’t quite right, and it sorta failed the ‘worth carrying around Europe in a backpack for the next 2 weeks’ test. It was neat to browse, though.
Our next stop was the museum that I’m still not sure how to pronounce correctly: the Rijksmuseum. Perhaps thankfully it was undergoing reconstruction, so the collection was severely truncated. More like concentrated, though. Just the coolest stuff was left. There were some neat artifacts relating to the history, both rise and fall, of the Netherlands, including an immense dollhouse once owned by a very rich family.
Imagine this, but 4 meters tall
A plethora of impressive paintings, too, including a whole lot of them by one of the most famous portraitists of all time, Rembrandt. There were lots of neat descriptions in english, too. I like reading about the sorted histories or strange historic details that make these paintings important. Several more hours spent in here, fully enjoyable.
Let’s talk about orange. Queens night, and Queens day is a birthday celebration for the Queen of the Netherlands. More practically, it’s like Marti Gras: lots of people drinking in public. And everyone wears orange. Well walking around after our museum trips, we began to see signs of the coming party-pocalypse. Orange being strung up, and stages being assembled in the museum square and Rembrandt square, right outside our hotel.
Jessie at the dappermarket
On the way back we walked through the ‘dappermarket’, which I likened to a big flea market. Some farmers market stalls, some cheesy shops, some street food, and even the occasional interesting store. Between all the walking around looking at the city and the stroll through the dappermarket we actually ended up walking all the way back to the hotel.
Later on, Queens Night started. We went out to explore and look around. A couple of notes:
-The only real thing to do is to drink in public, which I wasn’t even that into back when it was the age-appropriate thing to do.
-They sing some song (happy birthday?) pretty much every hour
-It’s nothing like as crazy as Queens day, the next day.
Me and a 'friendly native' on queens night.
We strolled around listening to people sing unintelligible songs in Dutch. I led us over to an area in front of a DJ booth where we danced around for a while until it started to rain. We kept dancing, it was just a little harder to avoid getting jostled by pedestrians trying to get...somewhere. that and all the empty beer bottles on the ground were a serious slip-fall-broken glass hazard. So we stayed out for a bit and then decided to call it an early night. By the sounds of it, we were the only ones, as the drunken public debauchery and loud music continued until quite late. It had to have stopped at some point, though, because when we woke up the next day, it was silent.
-N
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