4 nights in Amsterdam 2011

 4 nights in Amsterdam  25/1/2011

The first night we stayed in a BB out of the centre of the city a typical narrow building where you have to climb a steep flight of steps, and had excellent dinner at the owner’s Italian restaurant where he was the only waiter. This restaurant only opens from 5pm till 11 pm and what we enjoyed about it was that it was only locals and all regular customers and most people seemed to know each other.
The next day we went to our hotel where the teacher’s convention took place. The Movinpik is near the Central Railway station but on land in the harbour that is reclaimed from the sea.
Amsterdam is known for its bicycles and you see them by the thousands in fact there are so many at the station that you might have to walk far to find a place to lock your bike. The bikes are very plain ordinary and I hardly saw broken or abandoned bikes with wheels stolen.
We went to visit the fishing town of Volendam a 20 minute bus ride from Amsterdam with beautiful old houses with strict rules of standard architecture.  Here the bikes were a better quality with gears.

When I was in Amsterdam 34 years ago I spoke Afrikaans and struggled to understand what people were saying in Dutch most of the time now people answer any foreigner in English and the standard of English is very high.
We were up early for breakfast for Astrid to go to the first lecture and I put on my warm clothes and got the tram to the city centre to the Friday book market.  About quarter of the books sold are in English the one person I spoke to told me that the Dutch read a lot in English.
I found an unusual book and by then the museums were beginning to open and went to the Dutch Resistance Museum.  I consider this one of the most interesting museums as it has a collection of memorabilia from people in the resistance.  The museum give the impression that the Dutch have done a lot of soul searching since the war on what happened, what they did or neglected to do. That under German occupation an almost civil war was going one.  The pro Nazis, the people who kept quiet and the resistance. The Germans arrested resistance people and the next time there was an attack on Germans the already arrested people were shot in a public square. The resistance became very active after Normandy but the last winter of the war the populated starved as they could not get food from the rural area as there were no means of transport. No barges or even bicycles and people had to go out buy food from farmers and carry it back. Every tree was cut down to keep people warm and the wood in the Ashkenazi synagogues was taken out for fuel
Nearby there is the theater that was used as an assembly point where Jews were assembled before being put on the trains and it has become a place of memorial.
Round the corner from there is the Jewish Museum which is a complex of 3 Ashkenazi synagogues together portraying Jewish history of Amsterdam and Jewish life and customs but the aspect that interested me was the post war period when Jews returned and were in a quandary whether to rebuild what was left of Jewish life or many who emigrated to Israel and the States or Canada. Across the road is the Portuguese synagogue which for reason unknown was left intact during this period.
From there I went to the Hoyt Willemse Huis - this is the house of a wealthy family showing you their wealth style of furniture and art collection that they left to the city as they had no heirs. There were a number of other wealthy homes donated to the city and preserved for visiting.
Rembrandt House is interesting as he only lived in it for about 20 years till he went bankrupt but it was always known as his house till the government bought it up a heritage property.  In it there was an explanation on making on lithographs. Today an artist makes a number of copies and destroys the plate.  Rembrandt sold the plate with copies but others later made copies of his work from them.  There was also an explanation on paint making in those days using powder, alcohol turpentine and linseed oil.
In the same street was the Bag and Purse museum which was a collection donated to the city and then more modern bags have been added.  This is not the type of thing that would interest me but it had many visitors. On of the things I found interesting was the box holders that fathers made for their children for school in which they would carry their slate books etc. Kids whose fathers were better craftsmen had a better looking wooden case.
Saturday I took a tram to the Rijksmuseum saw more art by Rembrandt as well as the Frans Hals big picture which are closely guarded against crazies that come to cut the art. But it was the van Gogh museum that I found very interesting and this seems to be one of the most popular museums in Amsterdam.
Van Gogh painted about 900 painting and they have over 200 of them besides his sketches there are also pictures of artists at the time who influences his art.  The whole creative period of Van Gogh is between 1880 and 1890.  After Vincent and his brother Theo died. Theo's widow promoted his art as she was left with a big collection and no income.
I went to 2 photographic museums; one had a collection of the works of Eugene Smith who was autistic and who from after WW2 worked for Life magazine portraying Spain under Franco, Albert Sweitzer in Africa, black poverty in the south USA.  This type of pictorial information disappeared as an art with the arrival of TV.
The weather was cold with some drizzle but I was well dressed and too active, every place you go into is overheated as well as the trams.