Got To Be Kidding Me, Three Consecutive Sunny Days

Amsterdam has treated us so well for weather that it feels like we are spoiled. Even Drew and his colleagues are stoked that they can put away warmer jackets even for a few days, but they may not be able to put them away in the evenings. When the sun starts to drop and evening approaches we are all looking for just a bit more coverage, well maybe not all of us, it is still Amsterdam. With this being our last full day, really last day whatsoever, we decided that we should at least take a run at one of the  museums. It was difficult to decide as the full Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum were both finally fully open. Steph twisted my ear a bit and we opted for the Van Gogh as we didn't want to lose an entire beautiful and warm day to the confines of the interior of a museum. (In truth she didn't have to twist my ear or arm, just a poor attempt at Vincent-related humor. I am writing this feeling a bit cheeky and am working to try and contain a few of the worst puns and inside jokes.)

The newly reopened Van Gogh museum is so well thought out and executed, with four floors of his work as well as a few of his contemporaries. While there always seems to be a line, we waited just 5 minutes to get our tickets and enter the museum, which meant no second guessing ourselves and our choice of museum. I won't bore you with photos of the art work as a simple web search will produce so many nice reproductions that there is little need to show the few shots we took in this space. Sorry to say that none of you will even be getting the couple of Van Gogh postcards we bought as we figured those would turn out better than any photos we could have taken.

*** Mini rant *** I keep talking about photos as I have found one of my mid-life pet peeves, those people who spend their entire time in a museum taking photos of everything possible and don't spend the time just looking at the art itself. The number of times I was pushed at or bumped so that they could get closer, feeling they had some divine right of the kings to push us non-photographing peons out of the way, actually had me so irritated that I would have had a field day if there was a central atrium camera drop available from the upper floors. Steph and I were taking time looking at his brush strokes and composition from different angles and distances which was something these people and their photographic brillance could never re-create, bunch of feckin'-idiots. The museum, it's contents, and the way it was set up were wonderful, but the camera bugs (jack wads) were wasting oxygen the rest of us would appreciate having at our disposal.

Steph and I ended our tour of the musuem wandering out onto the museumplein and finding a few spare feet of green space and just soaking up the sun and our stunning surroundings. Well maybe not just soaking it up based on the photo below, we were doing our share of people gawking and this shot has Steph taking a picture of the Van Gogh museum as I tak a shot of her having the Rijksmuseum in the background.

It was just a Tuesday so there were plenty of free square metered of space for people to occupy around us.

Next stop for us was the land of the rarely seen sun worshippers this spring in Europe, Vondelpark. We wondered the Vondel as people took every advantage of an increasingly warm and sunny day, but even this locale did not include the most clothing optional scene of the day. It was a much more restrained population in the park today, but it still was of great interest to watch all of the people doing everything they could to take advantage of the 70F temperatures. We grabbed a small nosh from one of the spots in the park before going over and taking a bit of time looking at the hostel my students will be staying at next spring for the International Traveling Classroom, the StayOk. It looks both comfortable and very bright orange throughout, but I do expect that the sun and the warmth will be something we will have to negotiate for as our time in March 2014 comes closer. Based on the couple of days here to get a sense of the place and its opportunities I think the students can come away having a great time in Amsterdam next spring without any Herculean effort.

As we walked back into Spiegelgracht, toward Drew's place we happened across a young lady admiring a sculpture that thousands of visitors are likely to have missed as they find their way to and from the museumplein. It is great in its simplicity and humor and must have been there for quite some time as the saw blade is being covered by the tree itself.

We stopped in the ticket outlet one last time after this just to see if there was any possibility of tickets for the night's Muse/Biffy Clyro concert and of course they didn't have any there and the only place you could actually get them was online with a chip and pin card . (I promise not to re-hash the other mini rant from day one Amsterdam, but needless to say this was so completely frustrating and disappointing for both Steph and I.)

We took a brief stop at the apartment to get refreshed before heading up to the Beer King bottle shop up around the corner from the Beer Temple we were at the previous night. I was intent on trying to pick up Sink the Bismark from Brewdog, but no luck at all on that front. The best I could do is pick up a Trappist Westvleteren 12, which I will have to patiently wait to experience as its full maturation isn't until February 2016. Quick trip up there done we headed back to catch up with Drew and take him to dinner as a small thanks for opening up his apartment to us for the couple days we were there.

Well there was one very somber and intense stop to make before we had dinner, the Anne Frank House. It was an experience that is really beyond words as you are in the exact location of their hiding during WWII. While I still won't stand in line all day to go through that experience again, especially since the line was only about a tenth as long at seven in the evening, it was worth every moment spent there and I have no way to figure out how someone could go through the tour untouched. Truly a stunning experience.

Such is the incongruity with which I tell you that we ate at De Prins in the Jaardin section, just up the canal from the Anne Frank House. It was a nice evening to sit out along the canal and see the wonderful houseboats along that section of the canal. I will agree with Drew that it is a shame that some of the more beautiful houseboats aren't a bridge or two further south on the canal so that they re in front of some of the more wonderful canal houses. We rounded out the gastronomical section of the evening with a stop by Winkel 43, a few blocks further up near Noorderkerk, on the east end of Westerstaat, for some very divine apple pie. Drew would not let it go that I hadn't told him that it was Steph's birthday during our time on the trip and had said there was no ending our time with him without getting this apple pie desert at some point, and there was no more perfect place for it than Winkel 43. We were not to be disappointed in the least, it was truly worth the wait to have it, regardless of when we had let Drew know of Steph's birthday. It actually became our phrase of that leg of the trip, "well if I had been told that it was Steph's birthday" was the mantra Drew seemed to be using with us regularly about such an oversight.

We finished the night with a leisurely walk back to his place along the canals enjoying the warmth and beauty of it all as things started to become lit up for the night. All in all it meant that leaving Amsterdam was going to be all the harder for Steph and I to do, we really just hadn't known what to expect of the place or the fact that it really had so much to expose to us, and everyone else who took time there.