A Dutch Treat
Part 4
Vondelpark is a beautiful city park - the largest in Amsterdam. You can’t have the place to yourself, though, because it’s estimated that ten million visitors go through the park every year. If you want privacy, you had better find someplace else to go. The park dates back to 1864, right when the American Civil War was raging, but that probably doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with setting up the park. It’s named for a writer and playwright named Joost van den Vondel. Here are a few views of the park:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._Sunny_Day.jpg
http://www.hdforindies.com/uploaded_...ark-716093.JPG
An interesting hostel that’s right in the middle of the park, the Stayokay:
http://www.vu.nl/en/Images/stayokay%...cm12-94148.jpg
Madame Tussauds seems to be spreading around the whole world, so that you can see wax versions of famous celebrities without having to visit the original in London. Amsterdam has its very own wax museum. Here’s what the building looks like, sharing space with the Peek and Cloppenburg department store:
http://aibek2.nomadlife.org/uploaded...163-781231.JPG
Here is the English website of the Amsterdam museum, where you can see for yourself what wax versions of Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, or David Beckham look like, but I don’t think you can buy life-size replicas of any of these to take home. You can, however, work on your abs by doing situps with David Beckham through some kind of video, although I can’t imagine who might want to do that. There are machines now available for working on your abs that are much more effective than old-fashioned situps, even though you would have to use these machines without the assistance of David Beckham:
http://www.madametussauds.com/Amsterdam/en/Default.aspx
The Amsterdam Dungeon isn’t my cup of tea, but younger folks might enjoy it. There is a chain of similar dungeons now slowly expanding throughout Europe. The Amsterdam version naturally has features that are unique to Holland, although some of the more general displays are shared with the other dungeons in England and Germany.
An example of a unique feature of Amsterdam’s is the Dutch East India Company setup. Tourists sit casually in a dockside bar that looks like something out of the 18th century, and are then captured and forced aboard a Dutch man-of-war. They aren’t allowed to leave until they have fought a sea battle or two. During their stay aboard, they have to be treated by the ship’s doctor, who uses techniques available way back in the 1700s rather than the modern medical amenities we have come to love, like soft rubber gloves.
Here’s what happens to you if you really mess up during your time in the dungeon:
http://andrewslife.net/dungeon%202.JPG
Here is the executioner who gets you if you don’t do well during your torture period above:
http://ronniekerswell.com/USERIMAGES/Executioner02.jpg
Amsterdam's Artis Zoo dates back to 1838, and has more than 700 animal species, as well as more than 200 kinds of trees. They have many animals on display in natural habitats rather than cages:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._Artis_Zoo.jpg
http://www.letsgodigital.org/html/re...sterdam_B5.jpg
http://www.zoochat.com/gallery/data/711/Artis36.JPG
The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam dates all the way back to 1675, and was said to be inspired by Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. In the time period when the synagogue was built, their entrances were required to be somewhat secluded and subdued, so they did not stand out. Here’s what it looked like in its earlier days, in an oil painting of 1680. The painting is on display at the Rijksmuseum:
http://www.wga.hu/art/w/witte/portusyn.jpg
And some contemporary views of this classic Sephardic synagogue:
http://a.imageshack.us/img291/9210/p...synagogue2.jpg
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/41/85...d3b9d5f2_o.jpg
The Magna Plaza is both a beautiful landmark, which I like, and a mammoth shopping center, which I don’t care for because I am usually very opposed to shopping. However, even I can make an exception to that rule in the case of the Magna Plaza. The 19th century building was designed in the Neo-Gothic style, and was originally a post office. It’s nice to know that many of the older buildings are being preserved, rather than being replaced by hideous modern buildings that look like shoeboxes or tin cans.
Here are some views of the building’s exterior, the first of which also shows an adjacent modern building which was constructed in the creative shoebox style of architecture:
http://www.settemuse.it/viaggi_europ...agna_plaza.jpg
http://commondatastorage.googleapis....al/3556560.jpg
And the interior is quite attractive too, as some of the older features were retained during the modernization process that allowed all of the new stores to fit perfectly into the old post office structure, and for all of the shoppers to move easily from one store to another:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3069/...c24b7e26_o.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3533/...7e7581e3_o.jpg
As a respite for shoppers whose tongues start to drag after their marathon shopping sprees, the HH Petrus and Paulus Church offers a place to relax and think about other things. While it’s situated among lots of retail places, this building dates back to 1700, and features a sign that says “Fifteen minutes for God” so the serious shoppers - the ones who carry around little leather portfolios holding all of their coupons - can think about things other than the 20% discount they got on all those tschotschkes that they need like a luchenkup.
I probably shouldn’t be using Yiddish words here because this church is a Roman Catholic one. Well, whatever denomination it is, I couldn’t find any good pictures of the church on the internet.
The Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam almost sounds like something you’d discuss in your Latin class, but it’s one of the oldest botanic gardens in the world. I don’t remember if anything happened there in that old classic by Dumas called The Black Tulip because I read that book so long ago. Maybe I’ll have to re-read it to find out. The gardens almost closed in 1987 because the University of Amsterdam couldn’t afford to continue subsidizing the operation, but some private citizens stepped forward to take over. Here are a few views of the gardens, which contain over 6,000 varieties of plants, but don’t worry as we won’t look at all 6,000:
http://img1.eyefetch.com/p/3h/508515...7216b8adel.jpg
http://commondatastorage.googleapis....al/2626246.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3265/...2ae46fcc_o.jpg
And speaking of black tulips, here are some tulips of other colors, but these are not at the Hortus Botanicus:
http://sudhindrak.files.wordpress.co...7/img_0502.jpg
http://thedude.com/images/red_orange_tulips.jpg
http://iowa.com/wp-content/uploads/2...ion-tulip3.jpg
The Hollandsche Schouwburg was a theater from 1892 until 1942, when the Nazis decided it would serve better as a deportation center for sending Jews to concentration camps. Anne Frank and her family passed through this place en route to Buchenwald, and other Jewish families went to other camps. It is a beautiful building and has now been converted to serve as a memorial to the Dutch Jews who had to encounter it when the Nazis arrived.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Schouwburg.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...urg_relief.jpg
http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com...msterdam-1.jpg
While I’ve said a couple of times that when discussing Dutch painting in this story, we will confine our attention to the Dutch Golden Age. However, we will make a single exception to this rule and visit the Van Gogh Museum, and we’ll even briefly discuss the artist for whom the museum is named. The two buildings making up the museum are new, one being built in 1973 and the other in 1999. These two buildings collectively cover both the shoebox and the tin can styles of the extremely creative modern architecture, so they look frighteningly similar to this, differing only in the color scheme:
http://therepublik.net/images/work/n...es_shoebox.jpg
http://winemaiden.com/wp-content/upl...2009-01-19.jpg
Rather than wasting any more time on the museum exterior than we already have, we will confine our attention to the artist Vincent Van Gogh and a few of his works. He was very high-strung in temperament, which is probably a common trait of artists.
He was born in 1853 in a small town in Holland, but at an early age moved to Belgium to study art, where he painted The Potato Eaters, along with other lesser-known works. Here’s The Potato Eaters, which is on display at the Rijksmuseum. You will note that this early work was quite subdued in color, in stark contrast to the bright colors he used later in his short life:
http://www.art-wallpaper.com/9509/Va...4x768-9509.jpg
In his early 30s, he moved to Paris, where he met other aspiring painters such as Pisarro, Monet, and Gauguin. After associating with these, he began sprucing up his colors. But he seemed to wear himself out, spending inordinate amounts of time arguing and then painting. In an effort to calm himself down, he moved to Arles, probably to give crossword puzzle editors something to put into their puzzles in the early part of the 21st century. Gauguin joined him in Arles, but their encounters led to the famous incident in which van Gogh was chasing Gauguin with a straight razor for some unexplained reason, but wound up cutting off part of his own ear in the process of trying to inflict some harm on his fellow painter. He wound up in an asylum after that, in what was just a temporary stop along the way.
Here are a few of his works:
Starry Night - which is, as far as I know, the only painting ever named for a Don McLean song:
http://christineparkdesign.com/blog/..._ballance1.jpg
Bedroom in Arles, which is presumably meant to be the bedroom in which van Gogh himself slept, but notice that he couldn’t even keep his wall paintings straight when he showed them in his own painting:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...room_Arles.jpg
The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night:
http://www.allartpainting.com/images...at%20Night.jpg
In 1890, when all van Gogh’s friends thought he was rounding the corner on improving his mental health, he proved just how wrong they were by shooting himself dead. He had only sold one painting during his days alive, something I often point out to my sister who sells many watercolors now - just not as many as she would like to.
In Amsterdam, there is a Van Loon Museum, named for the wealthy family who used the buildings as a residence before later converting it to a museum. This building’s exterior is quite breathtaking, as are the gardens that surround it. While the interiors don’t quite match the opulence of those in the Palace of Versailles, they are still pretty impressive.
The main attraction of this building to me was the fact that one of my favorite books when I was a teenager was called The Story of Mankind, written by Hendrik Willem Van Loon, but I doubt very seriously that he was in any way connected to the family that lived in this mansion. I must have read the book twenty times back then as a child because we didn’t have video games to distract us all day, nor did we even have television. One thing that really stood out in my mind was the book’s introduction, which reads as follows:
"High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is one hundred miles high and one hundred wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by."
The mansion-turned-museum’s exterior is worth a quick peek, but we won’t go through the interior, which just shows the lavish way in which the family lived:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._Loon_tuin.JPG
http://www.historizon.nl/images/Amst...van%20Loon.jpg
We will continue with a few more sights of Amsterdam in the next episode, and then move on to Rotterdam.