Amsterdam

Amsterdam:

A city full of smoke, houseboats, sin, bikes, water, and tourists.

Pictures from a March 2006 and a February 2007 Trip:

Here are two Van Gogh self-portraits that hang in the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Apparently, they do not allow you to take pictures there but I got off 10 or 12 before I got caught. These two paintings hang about 10 feet from one another and are much different than the self-portraits that I have seen of him from his time in Arles.

Van Gogh was enthralled with Japanese culture and did this painting after a wood block print by a Japanese artist. He added the frog and the crane – symbols for prostitution in his day. I have not seen a print of this anywhere else and I bought one for Laurel as a gift in the museum store.

This is a Rembrandt piece that was radiant! The subject’s skin just glowed and if you click on the picture, you can zoom in and see the detail in the face and hands.

While not as famous as Girl with Pearl Earring, The Milk Maid is a beautiful painting. The blue in his paint made me sit on a viewing couch and just stare at this painting.

This marble sculpture was so life-like and so detailed – from the baby’s hands to the mother’s mouth to the folds of her dress. It is entitled: Peasant Woman Nursing Her Child and is by Jules Dalou, 1838 – 1902. Click on the picture for a larger version.

This impish Cupid sits at the top of a stair case at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam

Wheat Field and Crows. This is thought to be the last painting done by Van Gogh before he shot himself. I love his yellow wheat fields. Date and circumstances of the painting aside, the color seems so life affirming to me. This is another that I snapped before being caught.

I loved the red and the blue in this piece. Sorry it isn’t clearer, but it was at this moment that I was asked by a guard to stop and put my camera away or I would have to leave the building. The portrait is of Guus Preitinger, the artist's (Kees van Dongen) wife and was done in 1911. It is the only painting by that artist in the Van Gogh Museum, but is a really large and bold one.

A three dimensional bronze representation of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. It is in a little square near a group of “smoking” coffee houses and not to far from one of his former homes. It took me forever to get this shot because people kept stepping in front of me to have their picture taken with the central figure. The tall statue in the back is of Rembrandt.

A quirky bronze that spoke to me in the entry of the Amsterdam Opera House.

This is the first type of house boat that one will find in the Amsterdam canals. It has a metal hull and was either once used as a barge or still has a working engine. This type has to be hauled out of the water every two years, by law, and taken to a ship yard for maintenance and repair.

This is the second type of houseboat. It is a concrete bathtub-type structure that has a fully insolated home built on it. This type does not have to be removed to a shipyard for check out, but if the canals freeze they are more prone to sink. This boat was in a canal that the Anne Frank House also borders. Look closely at the roof of this home. There is something in the grass… Click on the image and you will see the female of a nesting pair of mallard ducks that have made the grass their home.

This boat does not fit under the canal bridges and was tied up in the harbor very near where one point of the canal system comes in. All the boats in the canals and harbor are hooked up to water and sewer, but I still wouldn’t want to take a swim in the murky water there!

This is a view down the canal that the Anne Frank house is on. The weather was freaky that day and it would go from snow to sunshine in minutes and repeat the process again and again. This made for great voluminous clouds and crisp air. You can click on it for a full sized view.

The flower market. I was in the city just as the tulips were starting to bloom and the market was really bright. I wanted to bring some back for my mother, but as I have had a couple of issues bringing in stuff through customs before (too much wine, not declaring souvenirs, muddy climbing shoes, test equipment for work, etc…), I decided not to chance it.

Advertising in a neo-hippy market takes some ingenuity…

A good shot of the town hall and a commerce cannel near the harbor. Click and you can see a larger image.

The small building on the left is the actual building that Anne Frank and here family hid from the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. The two adjacent buildings to the right have been purchased by the Anne Frank Foundation and are now part of the museum there. Pictures were not allowed inside and out of respect I didn’t try to take any on the sly. Her actual diary in located in the top floor of one of the buildings beneath thick glass. It is a small plaid book with a little brass lock on it to keep out prying eyes. It was a really powerful experience to be in that place. The house overlooked this beautiful tree-lined canal, it was two houses from a church, and yet it was witness to a time of unspeakable horror and a realized fear for a group of people just trying to survive until better times. I don’t own a copy of Anne’s book, but I think that I will get a hard cover edition and include it in my personal library. Those who forget the past…

The working bikes of Amsterdam!! Click on the picture and you will see some of the other cool working bikes of the city.

There are, according to a statistic provided by the tourist office, 285,000 bikes in Amsterdam. 100,000 of them get stolen every year. Thieves there are relentless and amazing in their feats of brazen robbery. Every spring the canals are cleaned with a huge magnet and pincers mounted on a barge. They pull thousands of the missing bikes out and send them off for recycling. Click on the picture and you can see some of the stolen bikes or what was left of them, which I saw during my trip.

It is getting to be REALLY hard to be an American abroad these days. I have talked to countless people who say in various levels of broken English, “I like American people, but American politics/George Bush - very bad.” We, as a culture abroad, have never had a really stellar reputation and it is just getting worse. I saw this t-shirt for sale in a market and saw countless similar ones walking around the streets of Germany and Amsterdam.

The stairwells in the homes are so tight that moving furniture up them is impossible. So, all the houses and stores in the city are built with a beam and a hook or eyelet that is used to bring big stuff up and through the windows of the homes and shops.

This is a picture of one of the canals in the Red Light District. Take a picture there at night in the presence of one of the working girls and you get your camera smashed and probably an ass beating from a topless woman who has anonymous sex and doesn’t have to legally have an HIV test to work. No thank you!! The Red Light District at night is strange indeed. I went there around 9:00 one night and it was amazingly touristy: thousands of English, American, and German couples and groups of 20 and 30-something guys gawking at the girls in their glass framed doorways and windows. There were sex shops everywhere, cops on every corner, the pungent smell of hash filled the air, narrow twisting alleys, and women from the Penthouse-type to overgrown dudes with a 5:00 shadow, heels and a wig waiting for a gentleman caller?! During the 30 minutes that I walked there, I didn’t see one guy go into or come out of any of the doors – A couple talked to a girl, but they laughed and either walked or were pulled away before a transaction could take place.

The Bull Dog, one of the touristy “smoking” coffee houses in the city. Smoke rolled out of this place 24/7. While there are hundreds of these types of bars in town, good luck finding one that only serves coffee. My only major complaint about Amsterdam was that I couldn’t escape the smoke – cigarette or pot/hash. Everyone in the city smokes something and it was almost impossible to get away from it. A non-smoking section in a restaurant you might think – nope! They were few and far between and if I happened upon one it was like a non-peeing section in a pool: the smoke eventually found its way to me. At the end of my trip I just wanted a shower to get the stench off of me. I had to seal up the cloths I wore up in a plastic bag so that they would not pollute the rest of my luggage or the house when I got home.

Amsterdam: A city full of smoke, houseboats, sin, bikes, water, and tourists.
Pictures from a March 2006 and a February 2007 Trip:




















	Here are two Van Gogh self-portraits that hang in the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Apparently, they do not allow you to take pictures there but I got off 10 or 12 before I got caught. These two paintings hang about 10 feet from one another and are much different than the self-portraits that I have seen of him from his time in Arles.

Van Gogh was enthralled with Japanese culture and did this painting after a wood block print by a Japanese artist. He added the frog and the crane – symbols for prostitution in his day. I have not seen a print of this anywhere else and I bought one for Laurel as a gift in the museum store.

	This is a Rembrandt piece that was radiant! The subject’s skin just glowed and if you click on the picture, you can zoom in and see the detail in the face and hands.

While not as famous as Girl with Pearl Earring, The Milk Maid is a beautiful painting. The blue in his paint made me sit on a viewing couch and just stare at this painting.

	This marble sculpture was so life-like and so detailed – from the baby’s hands to the mother’s mouth to the folds of her dress. It is entitled: Peasant Woman Nursing Her Child and is by Jules Dalou, 1838 – 1902. Click on the picture for a larger version.

This impish Cupid sits at the top of a stair case at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam

	Wheat Field and Crows. This is thought to be the last painting done by Van Gogh before he shot himself. I love his yellow wheat fields. Date and circumstances of the painting aside, the color seems so life affirming to me. This is another that I snapped before being caught.

I loved the red and the blue in this piece. Sorry it isn’t clearer, but it was at this moment that I was asked by a guard to stop and put my camera away or I would have to leave the building. The portrait is of Guus Preitinger, the artist's (Kees van Dongen) wife and was done in 1911. It is the only painting by that artist in the Van Gogh Museum, but is a really large and bold one.

	A three dimensional bronze representation of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. It is in a little square near a group of “smoking” coffee houses and not to far from one of his former homes. It took me forever to get this shot because people kept stepping in front of me to have their picture taken with the central figure. The tall statue in the back is of Rembrandt.

A quirky bronze that spoke to me in the entry of the Amsterdam Opera House.

	This is the first type of house boat that one will find in the Amsterdam canals. It has a metal hull and was either once used as a barge or still has a working engine. This type has to be hauled out of the water every two years, by law, and taken to a ship yard for maintenance and repair.

This is the second type of houseboat. It is a concrete bathtub-type structure that has a fully insolated home built on it. This type does not have to be removed to a shipyard for check out, but if the canals freeze they are more prone to sink. This boat was in a canal that the Anne Frank House also borders. Look closely at the roof of this home. There is something in the grass… Click on the image and you will see the female of a nesting pair of mallard ducks that have made the grass their home.

	This boat does not fit under the canal bridges and was tied up in the harbor very near where one point of the canal system comes in. All the boats in the canals and harbor are hooked up to water and sewer, but I still wouldn’t want to take a swim in the murky water there!

This is a view down the canal that the Anne Frank house is on. The weather was freaky that day and it would go from snow to sunshine in minutes and repeat the process again and again. This made for great voluminous clouds and crisp air. You can click on it for a full sized view.



The flower market. I was in the city just as the tulips were starting to bloom and the market was really bright. I wanted to bring some back for my mother, but as I have had a couple of issues bringing in stuff through customs before (too much wine, not declaring souvenirs, muddy climbing shoes, test equipment for work, etc…), I decided not to chance it.

Advertising in a neo-hippy market takes some ingenuity…

	A good shot of the town hall and a commerce cannel near the harbor. Click and you can see a larger image.

The small building on the left is the actual building that Anne Frank and here family hid from the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. The two adjacent buildings to the right have been purchased by the Anne Frank Foundation and are now part of the museum there. Pictures were not allowed inside and out of respect I didn’t try to take any on the sly. Her actual diary in located in the top floor of one of the buildings beneath thick glass. It is a small plaid book with a little brass lock on it to keep out prying eyes. It was a really powerful experience to be in that place. The house overlooked this beautiful tree-lined canal, it was two houses from a church, and yet it was witness to a time of unspeakable horror and a realized fear for a group of people just trying to survive until better times. I don’t own a copy of Anne’s book, but I think that I will get a hard cover edition and include it in my personal library. Those who forget the past…

The working bikes of Amsterdam!! Click on the picture and you will see some of the other cool working bikes of the city.

There are, according to a statistic provided by the tourist office, 285,000 bikes in Amsterdam. 100,000 of them get stolen every year. Thieves there are relentless and amazing in their feats of brazen robbery. Every spring the canals are cleaned with a huge magnet and pincers mounted on a barge. They pull thousands of the missing bikes out and send them off for recycling. Click on the picture and you can see some of the stolen bikes or what was left of them, which I saw during my trip.

It is getting to be REALLY hard to be an American abroad these days. I have talked to countless people who say in various levels of broken English, “I like American people, but American politics/George Bush - very bad.” We, as a culture abroad, have never had a really stellar reputation and it is just getting worse. I saw this t-shirt for sale in a market and saw countless similar ones walking around the streets of Germany and Amsterdam.

	The stairwells in the homes are so tight that moving furniture up them is impossible. So, all the houses and stores in the city are built with a beam and a hook or eyelet that is used to bring big stuff up and through the windows of the homes and shops.

This is a picture of one of the canals in the Red Light District. Take a picture there at night in the presence of one of the working girls and you get your camera smashed and probably an ass beating from a topless woman who has anonymous sex and doesn’t have to legally have an HIV test to work. No thank you!! The Red Light District at night is strange indeed. I went there around 9:00 one night and it was amazingly touristy: thousands of English, American, and German couples and groups of 20 and 30-something guys gawking at the girls in their glass framed doorways and windows. There were sex shops everywhere, cops on every corner, the pungent smell of hash filled the air, narrow twisting alleys, and women from the Penthouse-type to overgrown dudes with a 5:00 shadow, heels and a wig waiting for a gentleman caller?! During the 30 minutes that I walked there, I didn’t see one guy go into or come out of any of the doors – A couple talked to a girl, but they laughed and either walked or were pulled away before a transaction could take place.

	The Bull Dog, one of the touristy “smoking” coffee houses in the city. Smoke rolled out of this place 24/7. While there are hundreds of these types of bars in town, good luck finding one that only serves coffee. My only major complaint about Amsterdam was that I couldn’t escape the smoke – cigarette or pot/hash. Everyone in the city smokes something and it was almost impossible to get away from it. A non-smoking section in a restaurant you might think – nope! They were few and far between and if I happened upon one it was like a non-peeing section in a pool: the smoke eventually found its way to me. At the end of my trip I just wanted a shower to get the stench off of me. I had to seal up the cloths I wore up in a plastic bag so that they would not pollute the rest of my luggage or the house when I got home.