And On the Tenth Day…
Anyway, the tenth day dawned and there we were. In Amsterdam, being turfed onto the wharf several hours before any hotel in Amsterdam was ready to receive new guests. Funny about how that works.
I shared a taxi most of the way to my hotel, in an older building little more than 200 m from the Rijksmuseum. Typical European hotel – tiny elevator, narrow hallways, rooms that are just big enough. And yet, comfortable bed, hot running water, and a TV showing every sports channel and news channel known to mankind. Oh, and the included breakfast buffet (which included real, fresh-cooked scrambled eggs) was definitely edible.
My hotel on the right with the Rijksmuseum behind it.
Once ensconced in my hotel, I contacted Dave and Sue who had disembarked from their river cruise, also at 7am, and had taken the free shuttle to their hotel close to the airport. They came back to the downtown core, I crossed town using the metro, and we rendezvoused pretty close to where we had all been at 7am. Just in time for lunch at one of the many roadside patios with it’s home restaurant somewhere nearby. We ate, we talked, we watched people. Amsterdam like Edinburgh, was swarming with tourists. After a good meal, we went our separate ways. They were flying out the following morning.
And I seem not to have taken a single photo to commemorate this major meeting on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact my pictures of Amsterdam are a weird set of streetscapes and canals that display little of what I did.
Scores of tourists everywhere. A somewhat younger crowd than in Edinburgh.
Once we said goodbye after lunch, I wandered further into the downtown, and when I passed the door to the sex museum, I naturally went down the stairs. As did scores of other people. Paid my money and wandered in.
In the 1970s this look at sex through the ages might have been titillating, but in 2024 it seemed particularly passé. But it was sure raking in the money. Nothing you don’t see on TV these days. Lots of dated innuendo. I wandered out.
Yes, there are crowds. But the canals offer much more tranquil vistas.
Then I made my way back to my hotel and took the hotel’s recommendation of a very small Indonesian restaurant for dinner. Eating alone can be OK for a while, but…
The next day I had a tour booked at the Rijksmuseum. In the morning. I got there in time, carrying my umbrella and my entry pass. Was ushered forward and directed to the pick-up area for the tour. Went on an exceptionally good tour with a real live tour guide who told us enough about what we were seeing, but not too much. And she spoke English clearly and crisply. Even with my hearing, I could hear everything she said in a noisy space.
Highlight of the tour was undoubtedly Rembrandt’s Nightwatch, being given some tender loving care, but still on display with the scaffolds used by the curators all around it. It was immense – far larger than I had imagined. Being the weekend, the conservators were not conserving, but what a great way to give the exhibits the care they need without depriving, and perhaps informing, the public.
Towards the end of the tour a museum guard suddenly came up to me and spoke in accusatory tones (but I did not understand what he was saying – may have been Dutch to me). The members of my tour group all stared at me. I looked to the guide. She said I was not supposed to have an umbrella in the museum. I protested that I had carried it in openly and nobody had said anything about it until now. What was I to do.
Collectively, we all realized that walking back through the museum with it, in order to check it, would likely just get me incarcerated by the guards. Again, that wonderful tour guide had a solution: “Here, pop it in my bag” That solved the problem, the guard departed, and we finished our tour.
But we did not finish our tour at the starting point. At the completion of the tour the guide gave us directions to get back to the start point, while encouraging us to browse further on our own. People dispersed. The guide was about to disperse as well, but I said, “er, my umbrella?” She gave it to me, our eyes met, and I said, “What do I do now?” We tried some nearby lockers (why they were so far from the main entrance I have no idea), but none were empty and there was still the issue of getting the umbrella through the museum again.
And then my tour guide became my fairy godmother. “Follow me” she cried as she walked towards a wall, which had a door more or less concealed in it. She produced a key and suddenly we were inside a storeroom filled with Rijksmuseum bags just like hers. She grabbed one, put my umbrella inside it, and gave it to me saying, “Don’t tell anyone”. Then we were out of the storeroom, and she vanished off to do another tour. I continued my exploration of the museum, and eventually exited, umbrella intact, and me now the proud owner of a Rijksmuseum bag.
The gardens outside the Rijksmuseum, with a lovely statue and a water feature that does pause briefly to permit people to get inside the jets without getting wet.
I wandered off to find some lunch at a café in the grounds of the museum, stopping on the way at a rather neat garden with a captivating statue and a water feature that I’d never seen anywhere else, before setting off by metro towards the downtown core.
Deep down I felt it my responsibility to see the red light district and the famed windows, but I realized that mid-afternoon was probably not the best time. So I wandered through some of the gay quarter – actually more like the gay half – of Amsterdam. Lots of attractive people in the streets. Otherwise not much to see.
I came to a square featuring a statue of Rembrandt, with cafes occupying every foot of shop frontage on all four sides. Seemed like a good place for a people-watching dinner. I’ve now discovered it was Rembrandtplein, with the most famous statue of Rembrandt in all of Amsterdam. See, I am a born tourist, wandering inexorably towards one highlight after another!
I did not read the plaque, but Google later told me I had eaten dinner at Rembrandtplein and this was his statue.
Dinner time was approaching, so I began to look at menus and at the plates of food in front of people. I asked one Maitre ‘d which was the best café on the square. He said his was and I said, “What about your competitor over there” Not a way to endear yourself so I wandered further. Eventually I took a table at a place which had some customers, but not too many, and a good view of the passing parade. And ate my dinner. Then wandered back towards the metro and back to my hotel.
I think Amsterdam has been the place where I was most conscious of travelling alone. Solitary touring is fine in the daytime, but as evening approaches, it becomes less and less enjoyable. The throngs of tourists in Amsterdam were clearly there to have fun and I am sure there is a lively bar and nightclub scene. But somehow, alone, at my age, I just did not feel like sidling into a bar for a drink or two to while away the evening. Maybe the fact that I used ‘sidling’ instead of ‘striding’ is part of the problem. Anyhow, I had had a full day and the Van Gogh Museum was all arranged for the following day. My bed was very comfortable.
Some of the canals are quite wide thoroughfares, others narrow, with a mixture of mostly slow vessels travelling here and there.
My final full day in Amsterdam dawned with scattered showers, and the tour of the Van Gogh Museum was for mid-afternoon. I got breakfast, and headed off toward the metro but decided instead to take a canal tour (which can be broken at any stop – you just board the next ferry), heading into downtown. Seeing Amsterdam from the water was a bit of a surprise. I vaguely expected expensive pleasure craft moored alongside as is the case in those boring Florida canal estates. Instead I witnessed the greatest collection of rundown run-abouts I had ever seen. Boats from 15 ft aluminum dinghies with small outboards on the back to all sorts of inboard pleasure craft, all a bit down at the ear, usually with over-full bilges so they were in imminent danger of sinking. Interspersed with these were houseboats in bewildering variety but also mostly suffering years of neglect. Some were boats that had been converted. Others were barges with architecturally designed buildings on top. But nearly all were in a strange state of disrepair. I am exaggerating a bit – there were some boats in good repair – but this was not a James Bond or Tom Cruise sort of canal ecosystem.
Another discovery about Amsterdam’s canals. They are waterways predominantly at the back of buildings with proper street frontages. So, a canal tour is a tour past the back yards of people’s homes. I had always been told how clean the Dutch were. Clean and without a shred of a sense of humor. Well, don’t know about the humor, but Amsterdam could do with a city-wide decluttering. In any event, it was a relaxing and vaguely interesting way to get downtown.
Once there I wandered towards the red light district, but again failed to find it, and again, late morning is hardly the time to visit. Back on the ferry to get back to the vicinity of my hotel. This time I walked past, actually through, the Rijksmuseum to get to the Van Gogh museum, stopping for lunch at a relatively conventional café on a side street.
The Van Gogh Museum is an impressive building on the outside. In my memory, it’s a huge ovaloid structure raised above the ground on a pedestal which forms the ground floor. But when I looked at pictures of it on the web I see I was not seeing correctly that day. But it is all curves and sheer vertical or tilted walls. Definitely interesting.
For some unaccountable reason I did not take a photo of the van Gogh Museum so I have had to borrow this one. I was not impressed by what I experienced inside.
Inside it is a series of floating floors joined by a stairway that rises in the centre of the building. There is an elevator as well, but I used the stairs as did most people, going up to the top floor and working my way down. In this museum I had an audio device instead of a human guide. I had really been looking forward to the Van Gogh Museum. His best work is much less ‘photographic’ than Rembrandt’s, and more to my liking because of that.
But I was to be disappointed. Maybe I was tired, but I found the museum filled with drab, dreary works, and did not stumble upon any of his masterpieces. Where were they all hidden. Furthermore, the structure of the building which led to wandering haphazardly around each floor, combined with the lack of signage or any real sense that the paintings were groups in some rational way got me increasingly irritated. I think they were displayed chronologically, but you had to read the fine print to see any dates. My audio guide was virtually useless because it droned on about every painting for what seemed like hours, telling me all sorts of things that seemed not in the least interesting, and the narrator seemed bored as well. True, there were ways to skip from painting to painting, and to view the works in any order, but such skipping was not easily accomplished and you still had to deal with the endless hours of trivia.
Back on the main floor, when I handed back my audio device, I told them what I thought of the device and the layout of the museum. Outside, I thought I had probably been a little harsh. But I did not re-enter to apologize.
So, with a disappointment behind me I wondered what I could do to cheer up. Luckily I found the Moco Museum Amsterdam just round the corner from the van Gogh. Housed in an old building, likely once a large home, this museum featured decidedly modern art, including a couple of Banksy pieces and some very immersive installations using light and glass and mirrors. The museum refers to it as digital immersive art. It definitely surprised me and cheered me up a lot.
This was just one room, totally mirrored and with wonderful, kaleidoscopic patterns all around me. Very disorienting.
There was one video which appeared to be a waterfall, but when you looked closely the water was actually falling leaves, quite realistic in appearance individually, but moving together as if they were shimmering waves of water. There was one small, completely mirrored room, including floor and ceiling. Somehow they were projecting kaleidoscope type patters in neon colors so that all the walls contained these reflecting particles that shimmered and moved. I got quite lost standing there.
I could have spent ages peering into the ever-expanding inside of this modest sculpture.
I stumbled out of the building thoroughly elated and saw what appeared to be a small sculpture on a pedestal, a geometric structure, vaguely Buckminster Fuller. On closer inspection I saw that the walls of this structure were sometimes mirrors and sometimes clear glass, such that you could look into its interior. And like the Tardis, the inside was much larger than the outside. Now why could not the van Gogh Museum be like that?
I spent a bit of time in the park near my hotel, before heading out to the downtown for another dinner on a street watching the passing throngs. Then I returned to my hotel, packed most of my stuff up, logged in to get my boarding pass for the next day.
An uneventful trip to the airport, the usual routine with security, and low and behold, at the gate they upgraded me to business class and I flew home in style. Spent a night with the family before reclaiming my car and tackling the 400 back to ‘cottage country’ where two cats looked up as I entered, and then walked away.
Kevin is really happy to see me? Nope! Does not give a damn.
I’ve had time to reflect since this trip and I know two things. I am not interested in tourism for tourism’s sake. And cruise ships mostly give you tourism for tourism’s sake. And travelling alone does cramp your style, if you are someone who does not find it easy to walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation. I mean, what would we talk about? Places that are intriguing to me can be fine, but too many tours force you to spend time in places that lack any intrigue. Plus eating effectively alone for all your meals gets to be a bit of a bore. So, in future, I will try to ‘travel with’ or go some place where I will meet up with someone I know.