The Rijksmuseum

Thank goodness we’ve got some sunshine today. Yesterday was so dark, all day long, that you needed the lights on all day. I think it was probably the darkest day I can ever remember. However, today the skies are blue, even if the wind is once more whistling around & battering the house.

Regular readers will know, our main reason for going to Amsterdam was to see some more Rembrandt  after seeing the “Flight to Egypt” in Tours – we hadn’t realised at the time of booking that there was going to be exhibition on at the National Gallery in London this winter.

So, on our free day, we headed for the Rijksmuseum. If we saw nothing else, we were determined to get there. It’s an enormous place. We didn’t see it all by any means.

After our experience in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris when we nearly gave up before we got to the Impressionist section we’d really wanted to see, this time we headed straight for the Rembrandt.

One room is dominated by “The Night Watch”. I hadn’t realised it was so enormous. Within the room were various works by contemporaries on a similar theme.

It suddenly struck me these paintings were really the equivalent of the school photo/ works photo/ club photo for a day before the invention of the camera & film.

It also made you realise the greatness of Rembrandt. His characters seemed so much more distinctive, more alive (except for the dog on the bottom right, though that may have been a result of the vandalism done on the painting a while back). It also made you realise why some people would have been reluctant to employ him as a portraitist. He’s too honest. Oliver Cromwell may have wanted to be painted “warts & all” but few others do. Most of us want to be flattered a bit. The Franz Hals painting on a similar theme was certainly more flattering.

In the Rijksmuseum, in most rooms, they provided large cards drawing out various characteristics, & their significance, of the main painting in the room. I thought they were very illuminating, making you aware of things you maybe wouldn’t notice otherwise.

We went on to a few more rooms. We were struck by how impressed we are by Vermeer. We first discovered him as an artist when we visited the Mauritshuis gallery in the Hague nearly ten years ago to see “The Girl with a Pearl Earring” as part of our Pearl Wedding Anniversary celebration.

After several hours the Fox’s feet told us the time had come to once more venture out in the cold & explore more of Amsterdam itself.

We were disappointed that none of the Rembrandt had inspired us as much as the “Flight to Egypt” that we’d seen in Tours. Maybe the fact we weren’t expecting to come across the latter gave it an extra frisson. In Amsterdam we went expecting to be wowed. Or maybe some of Rembrandt’s more interesting works had been loaned to the National Museum in London. However, we felt pleased & satisfied to have been.

Wrong horses

One of our conclusions from our recent trip to Amsterdam is that we’re not very good at being organised. Or more precisely, we’re not very good at being organised by others.

This short trip included two included outings. The first was advertised as a guided tour of Amsterdam. We thought that wouldn’t take long & may be interesting. It turned into a tour of car tour of Noord Hollande.

Off we went to Monnickendam, with its narrow streets & old fishermen’s cottages. At one point you could see from the water levels either side of the sluice gates how much higher the sea was than the land. At another place was one of the, if not the, oldest church in the Netherlands.

We didn’t stop to properly look around or take photos. Instead we went on to a cheese & clog farmshop. Here we were told how cheese & clogs were made. The former I already knew – my mother always made cheese if we had a milk glut in summer. As for clogs I’m not really interested, much as I appreciate they can be beautifully painted. The Fox was reminded of the wooden clogs his father used to wear when the Fox was young – a common practice in Lancashire in times past.

The most interesting thing we learnt was not about cheese or clogs, but rather Christmas traditions. The 5^th of December is the day Santa visits children in the Netherlands. There is quite a controversy raging these days as Santa’s little helpers are blacked up – it’s from the soot in the chimneys they have to descend to deliver the presents. Now there is a brouhaha about whether this is racism & something derogatory to black people. As our guide says, if you were starting the tradition today, you may have done something else, but this has been the tradition for centuries, long before concepts such as racism existed.

From there we went onto Zaanse Schans, a monument to village life in the 17^th century. Here we saw windmills galore. Most were in working order. The Fox was reminded of the sounds & smells of the old water-powered corn mill he used to work in. We were left to take our time going around so we were able to amble around at our leisure. 

The saw mill with the cheese farm in the foreground

The pewter foundry

The problem with this day trip was that we had largely gone on holiday to Amsterdam to see Amsterdam. If we’d been staying for a week or so we may have appreciated a trip out of the city to see something of traditional life &architecture, but when we only had 3 days there we were loathe to waste time away from a city which has so much of interest to see. Admittedly we were grateful to have gone to Zaanse Schans in December. As several coachloads of tourists arrived & the place was swamped with people, we couldn’t help thinking in summer it must become a bit of a nightmare. We were grateful we were just leaving then.

Our second organised trip came on the Sunday, when we were sent off to the Christmas market at Westerpark, a fairly residential part of Amsterdam. We were dropped off & the transport was due to return four hours later to take us back to the hotel.

In half an hour we had walked around all the stalls & were left wondering what else we could do. The market was a small Sunday market, nothing particularly Christmassy about it. It seemed all the poorer because the day before, on our free day, we had come across a far more festive market in Rembrandtplein, in the city centre, It had music playing, lights twinkling, people dressed in Christmassy gear – so much more exciting. We decided to at least explore the park a bit.

On the way to the market we had passed an area with loads of herons in it so we headed there. 

Then headed a bit more into town but soon stopped when we saw an open café & the prospect of something to drink, &, in my case, a hot cup to put my hands around, was overwhelming. We entered the warmth & discussed what to do next..

Fortunately our driver had indicated that he couldn’t see how the, this year much reduced, Westerpark market could keep us entertained for four hours. He’d let us know he could come earlier if we just gave him a ring. We decided that’s what we would do. We didn’t see much point in going in the cold & threatening wet around a part of Amsterdam that was low on our priorities to explore, when we would much prefer to go round the Het Scheepvaartmuseum, the Maritime Museum. So after our drink, we headed back to the market, rang our driver & waited. It got progressively colder & wetter. He arrived & took us to the museum, rather than our hotel, & we spent the rest of the day there.

Het Scheepvaartmuseum

This was a much more fascinating place. Here we found about how the land was reclaimed from the sea. The country is still increasing in size, as you could easily see from the images of the country over the centuries. The Dutch seem to be incredibly inventive. If land is getting a bit crowded, you just take a bit more from the sea, or expand upwards into the air.

I was also surprised to realise the Dutch were still actively whaling in the 1960s. Somehow I thought it was an activity that had ceased more in Victorian times, though I do remember the embargo being introduced in my childhood. However, I’d thought, by then it was essentially a non-European activity. Seemingly not.

The Fox would have loved to have had the time to explore the “Amsterdam”, a reproduction East Indiaman. He did venture out to it, despite the rain, but by then it was getting late & it seemed more important to see what we could inside before the place closed for the day. 

The Amsterdam

We concluded this part of the day made up for the waste of time at the market. We’d just wished we could have spent the day at the museum & not have bothered with the market. We were very grateful that he driver had indicated he was happy to collect us early.

It is always a problem with these organised trips. Many people seem to get a lot of pleasure & satisfaction form them. We generally prefer to do a bit of research before we go away, decide where we fancy going & then go in our own time, unpressured by being hustled round quickly or just waiting for the trip to end. It’s a case of different things for different people. We’ve come to the conclusion optional trips suit us better, then we can opt out. For us the holiday would have been better if the flights, hotel transfers, IAmsterdam card (which gave you free trams, buses & a canal cruise, as well as free or reduced entry to most of the sights), possibly the use of a free taxi to go to where we chose, would have suited us better.

All the fun of the circus

One of the most memorable places we visited on our trip to Amsterdam was undoubtedly our visit to the Casablanca, a café-cum-bar-cum-restaurant. It really is one of its kind.

According to the leaflet we found inside it is the only such place in Europe devoted to the circus. Whenever circus performers are in the area they will meet up here.

Upstairs was a theatre. Needless to say, we never ventured there. Downstairs, in the part we were, before the steps, was a cosy bar. The welcome was warm, as the lady behind the bar came & sat down at our table to take our food order.

The décor of the bar area was covered with all things circus. The ceiling was papered with old circus posters. Every shelf & cranny contained pictures of performers, model vans with names such as Chipperfields & Roberts on them, playing cards & other toys featuring clowns on them etc. It was fabulous & joyous, capturing some of the excitement of the circus.

As we waited for our food to arrive, a man came up, all dressed in a sparkling pink jacket, dressed like a ringmaster. He sat down & started to perform magic tricks. He was really interested when he realised we recognised one of the tricks as one that Michael, a Polish barman/aspiring professional magician who used to work at our village pub, did. I get the impression the circle of magicians & circus people is a small closed one where everyone knows everyone.

As for the food, it was good. The tomato soup was rich & clearly homemade. The Fox then had a simply done whole sole on the bone. I had sea bass in a Mediterranean sauce. I expected it to be baked in a tomato/pepper/ possibly aubergine & courgette sauce. It wasn’t that at all. Instead it was in a fish stock based sauce, with shrimps, mushrooms & mussels in it. Delicious. The chef is a former acrobat – as I say, all things circus related!

It’s certainly a place if ever we were in Amsterdam we would go again.

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PS For some of the frustration of our drive down to  Liverpool read the Fox's latest blog. Thank goodness we took a paper map with us so didn't have to go via Buxton!