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tetsabSo a number of months ago the gal I went to Iceland with reached out and said "Do you want to go to Amsterdam for a week?" The answer to this was, in point of fact, no. I do not want to go to anywhere in Europe for a week 'cause I'll just start to get over the jetlag and then have to fly back home BUT, the answer was: if you want to go to Amsterdam at this particular time that lines up with Wave Gotik Treffen I'd be up for that. And so that is what was done.
There were only 2.5 bad things about this trip. The 1st is that I woke up the day we were to fly at 3am with a sore throat. Yes, I was getting a cold before travelling for the 1st time ever. The 2nd is that my foot is still messed up from being what I feel I may have to scale up from being "ever so slightly hit by a car". The negative impact was that the 1st 3 days of walking were horrible and I had to take ibuprofen each day but the positive is that it got much better after that and that my foot is, while still not right, certainly better than when I left (meaning: no more daily pain but still have restricted movement problems, particularly getting a full flex going down stairs). The .5 is that I got a $725 fraudulent online charge on my credit card the day I got back but that could be a coincidence and in any case appears to have been handled (insofar as it's vanished off my online statement but I'll wait for the paper to be sure).
We left from Toronto at 6:30pm and I'd take a picture (appropriately of a pile of tulips in the Keukenhof gardens by) 9:30am local time. This turned out to be a very good technique for fending off exhaustion: just throw yourself straight into 4 hours of walking around a huge garden. We were mostly here 'cause my friend loves tulips but I have no complaints about gardens (tulips are the feature but not the only flower) and certainly found even pretty darn striking tulips.
A bit silly but the way this works is that you take the bus straight from the airport, use the handy free luggage storage at the gardens, take the bus back to the airport and then take the train into Amsterdam proper where I took my 1st photo (also appropriately of a Van Gogh themed ferry with cyclists) at 2:30pm. The rest of the day was pretty low key. We were staying in the tiny captain's room of a houseboat, which took a while to find, on the Keizergracht canal. For the next 3-4 hours my friend napped (this was our bed) while I read an Amsterdam walking guide and sporadically dozed. The evening was for grocery shopping (tissue papers being a desperate need due to the whole "I have a cold" thing), a burger for dinner and getting to bed early.
Day 2 it was back to the central train station to get a 48 hour museum and transit card and then straight to it by heading to: the Oude Kerk (old church) -> the Nieuwe Kerk (a whole ~150 years younger than the 'old church': 1380 vs. 1213) -> the Amsterdam museum -> the Bloemenmarkt -> Outsider Art & Dutch 'Golden Age' portraits at the Hermitage Amsterdam -> the Homomonument.
The World Press Photo expo was on in the De Nieuwe Kerk which meant very striking journalistic images juxtaposed with the church setting.
I needed a few hours to rest my foot after that so we paused but were back out for a 30 minute canal tour (also part of the museum & transit card) by 8:30. After this it was probably more food, home, and bed.
Day 3 was more city card: 'Our Lord in the Attic' (a home with a full Catholic church in the attic from when being Catholic in public was a No) -> the Rembrandt House (being his house which was actually responsible for his bankruptcy) museum -> the Jewish Historical Museum -> the 17th century Portuguese Synagogue (from fleeing deathly persecution elsewhere) -> Botanical Garden -> museum of microbes(!) -> the biblical museum (some very old bibles on the top floor of a fancy pants house) -> Dutch costume museum -> Museum of Bags & Purses (where I oddly opted to take a picture of shoes) -> FOAM photography museum -> Van Gogh museum (entry had to be pre-booked) and ended the day by really pushing myself to the Stedelijk museum of modern art as my foot was already furious at me by the end of Van Gogh (I skipped the special exhibit on Japan in favour of sitting on a bench).
Day 4 my travel mate had taken a one day flight to Norway to see all things Edvard Munch which I wasn't up for. Instead I used the last few hours of my museum card (its 48 hours from activation) to go to the EYE film museum and then used the rest of the public transit half (activated separately from the museum portion and we'd only used it first at the end of the 1st day) to just ride the trams around to different parts of the city far out of the core. I made one walking stop in the large 'Oosterpark' (which includes public art about both the Dutch role in the slave trade and Theo Van Gogh) before taking my last tram of the day and walking home from the 'Jordaan' neighbourhood.
Day 5 was the only day calling for rain so we decided to go to the large museum it wasn't possible to do on the city card: the Rijksmuseum. One thing this trip really cemented for me is that I really don't much care about art produced from 1550 to 1850 but really enjoy great swathes of it before and after that span. In the evening we were off to a very different museum: the museum of prostitution near the Oude Kirk but it turned out to largely be two things: 1) facts about prostitution in the Netherlands and; 2) a sustained plea not to dehumanise people, which is more than fair (yet throughly depressing) to say the very least.
Day 6 was go on a 30km bike tour day. It started off in the core of the city, not far from the train station, but then got on a trail that followed the Amstel river down and then back up again. The ride down was maxing out on Dutch what with stopping off at a windmill and then a farm that produces cheese and clogs but the ride from there and then back up was pure lovely bike ride. The night (an hour before close or something wacky like that) was a trip to the Anne Frank museum. If you're going to this you'll have to book well in advance as this was the pretty much the only slot we could get a week or so before leaving. It continued a theme I wish had not been present of places previously full of life now dead.
Day 7 was the ill-fated trip to Belgium for a delicious waffle as tragically we only found a tasty waffle. Neither of us had known until arriving that Antwerp is still the Flemish portion and they're just not that into waffles. Ha. The easiest sum-up of my experience of Antwerp is in this picture: beautiful buildings, under construction. My favourite part was the beautiful Sint-Pauluskerk we stumbled into and its grounds. Pro tip for future travellers is to skip Antwerp on a Tuesday as pretty much everything is closed. Thankfully for me I was only there for a walking tour but having just travelled to Norway to see it my friend was tragically locked out of a Munch exhibit there! (And I would have liked to have seen the Goya portion if it was open).
Day 8 it was back to Canada from my friend on on to Cologne for me. I purposefully made a detour on the way to the station to see the outside of the Poezenboot -- the one thing I'd regretted to being able to fit in. Obviously the #1 reason I was in Cologne -- just passing through for one day on the way to Leipzig overnight -- was to see the cathedral and it did not disappoint. In sheer mass and density of decoration I have never seen anything like it.
Alright, back to the garden and more later as another thing that happened in the time away is that it exploded with chest height weeds. :s
There were only 2.5 bad things about this trip. The 1st is that I woke up the day we were to fly at 3am with a sore throat. Yes, I was getting a cold before travelling for the 1st time ever. The 2nd is that my foot is still messed up from being what I feel I may have to scale up from being "ever so slightly hit by a car". The negative impact was that the 1st 3 days of walking were horrible and I had to take ibuprofen each day but the positive is that it got much better after that and that my foot is, while still not right, certainly better than when I left (meaning: no more daily pain but still have restricted movement problems, particularly getting a full flex going down stairs). The .5 is that I got a $725 fraudulent online charge on my credit card the day I got back but that could be a coincidence and in any case appears to have been handled (insofar as it's vanished off my online statement but I'll wait for the paper to be sure).
We left from Toronto at 6:30pm and I'd take a picture (appropriately of a pile of tulips in the Keukenhof gardens by) 9:30am local time. This turned out to be a very good technique for fending off exhaustion: just throw yourself straight into 4 hours of walking around a huge garden. We were mostly here 'cause my friend loves tulips but I have no complaints about gardens (tulips are the feature but not the only flower) and certainly found even pretty darn striking tulips.
A bit silly but the way this works is that you take the bus straight from the airport, use the handy free luggage storage at the gardens, take the bus back to the airport and then take the train into Amsterdam proper where I took my 1st photo (also appropriately of a Van Gogh themed ferry with cyclists) at 2:30pm. The rest of the day was pretty low key. We were staying in the tiny captain's room of a houseboat, which took a while to find, on the Keizergracht canal. For the next 3-4 hours my friend napped (this was our bed) while I read an Amsterdam walking guide and sporadically dozed. The evening was for grocery shopping (tissue papers being a desperate need due to the whole "I have a cold" thing), a burger for dinner and getting to bed early.
Day 2 it was back to the central train station to get a 48 hour museum and transit card and then straight to it by heading to: the Oude Kerk (old church) -> the Nieuwe Kerk (a whole ~150 years younger than the 'old church': 1380 vs. 1213) -> the Amsterdam museum -> the Bloemenmarkt -> Outsider Art & Dutch 'Golden Age' portraits at the Hermitage Amsterdam -> the Homomonument.
The World Press Photo expo was on in the De Nieuwe Kerk which meant very striking journalistic images juxtaposed with the church setting.
I needed a few hours to rest my foot after that so we paused but were back out for a 30 minute canal tour (also part of the museum & transit card) by 8:30. After this it was probably more food, home, and bed.
Day 3 was more city card: 'Our Lord in the Attic' (a home with a full Catholic church in the attic from when being Catholic in public was a No) -> the Rembrandt House (being his house which was actually responsible for his bankruptcy) museum -> the Jewish Historical Museum -> the 17th century Portuguese Synagogue (from fleeing deathly persecution elsewhere) -> Botanical Garden -> museum of microbes(!) -> the biblical museum (some very old bibles on the top floor of a fancy pants house) -> Dutch costume museum -> Museum of Bags & Purses (where I oddly opted to take a picture of shoes) -> FOAM photography museum -> Van Gogh museum (entry had to be pre-booked) and ended the day by really pushing myself to the Stedelijk museum of modern art as my foot was already furious at me by the end of Van Gogh (I skipped the special exhibit on Japan in favour of sitting on a bench).
Day 4 my travel mate had taken a one day flight to Norway to see all things Edvard Munch which I wasn't up for. Instead I used the last few hours of my museum card (its 48 hours from activation) to go to the EYE film museum and then used the rest of the public transit half (activated separately from the museum portion and we'd only used it first at the end of the 1st day) to just ride the trams around to different parts of the city far out of the core. I made one walking stop in the large 'Oosterpark' (which includes public art about both the Dutch role in the slave trade and Theo Van Gogh) before taking my last tram of the day and walking home from the 'Jordaan' neighbourhood.
Day 5 was the only day calling for rain so we decided to go to the large museum it wasn't possible to do on the city card: the Rijksmuseum. One thing this trip really cemented for me is that I really don't much care about art produced from 1550 to 1850 but really enjoy great swathes of it before and after that span. In the evening we were off to a very different museum: the museum of prostitution near the Oude Kirk but it turned out to largely be two things: 1) facts about prostitution in the Netherlands and; 2) a sustained plea not to dehumanise people, which is more than fair (yet throughly depressing) to say the very least.
Day 6 was go on a 30km bike tour day. It started off in the core of the city, not far from the train station, but then got on a trail that followed the Amstel river down and then back up again. The ride down was maxing out on Dutch what with stopping off at a windmill and then a farm that produces cheese and clogs but the ride from there and then back up was pure lovely bike ride. The night (an hour before close or something wacky like that) was a trip to the Anne Frank museum. If you're going to this you'll have to book well in advance as this was the pretty much the only slot we could get a week or so before leaving. It continued a theme I wish had not been present of places previously full of life now dead.
Day 7 was the ill-fated trip to Belgium for a delicious waffle as tragically we only found a tasty waffle. Neither of us had known until arriving that Antwerp is still the Flemish portion and they're just not that into waffles. Ha. The easiest sum-up of my experience of Antwerp is in this picture: beautiful buildings, under construction. My favourite part was the beautiful Sint-Pauluskerk we stumbled into and its grounds. Pro tip for future travellers is to skip Antwerp on a Tuesday as pretty much everything is closed. Thankfully for me I was only there for a walking tour but having just travelled to Norway to see it my friend was tragically locked out of a Munch exhibit there! (And I would have liked to have seen the Goya portion if it was open).
Day 8 it was back to Canada from my friend on on to Cologne for me. I purposefully made a detour on the way to the station to see the outside of the Poezenboot -- the one thing I'd regretted to being able to fit in. Obviously the #1 reason I was in Cologne -- just passing through for one day on the way to Leipzig overnight -- was to see the cathedral and it did not disappoint. In sheer mass and density of decoration I have never seen anything like it.
Alright, back to the garden and more later as another thing that happened in the time away is that it exploded with chest height weeds. :s
no subject
Date: 2018-05-28 11:29 am (UTC)I wonder if when I grow up, I can live on the cat boat.
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Date: 2018-05-29 01:56 am (UTC)It actually turns out I would have also been quite interested in the 3rd guy of the museum had I known who he was: Félicien Rops 'cause he hits on 2 of my interests in religious art (of a sort!) and comics.
I love the name of the cat boat. My brain would sporadically just chant away 'Poezenboot'. Ha.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-15 03:59 pm (UTC)At least you had fun!
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Date: 2018-06-19 12:13 am (UTC)And, yes, I actually know what you mean about the distance thing. Just for fun I looked up some equivalent trips for what I did.
Amsterdam to Antwerp is 168 km which gets me to between Brighton and Belleville and then it's 265 km to Kingston, which is similar to Amsterdam to Cologne at 267 km.
Cologne to Leipzig is 498 km, which is inbetween Toronto to Ottawa (450 km) and Montreal (541 km) following the same route.
... so all of that is all just trekking around the SW part of my Province or *just* squeaking over the border to the next one when Torontonians consider both of these doable day trips for special occasions!
Really drives home how damn tiny Europe is!