Amsterdam, Netherlands

It’s gonna be an exciting day…We are going to the museum! Yay?! Today on the hit list was the Van Gogh museum and the Rijksmuseum. I highly recommend going to these museums as they really bring out the best of Dutch art. It may sound boring but they are actually pretty good.

Let me tell you something about Amsterdam. It was made into a flourishing port by the Dutch merchants in the 16^th century as they began going and discovering new places like Indonesia and India. It has a population of 851,000 and a tourist population of 3.5 million people, so it is clearly a tourist city. The Hague is the political capital of the Netherlands but Amsterdam is the nominal capital of the country with the most people living there.

If you are on a tight schedule you could use the hop on hop off buses but even better are the hop on hop off cruises on the canal which will show you the entire heart of the city. But the best kind of tour in Amsterdam should be on a cycle with which you can also understand the daily routine of the people living there.

A big surprise is that in ‘coffee shops’ they don’t actually sell coffee but different kinds of weed and marijuana. It is legal there and the cigarettes were almost as bad as Egypt.

Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch artist who made his way into the world of art with no formal teaching about painting. The Van Gogh museum was huge, 3 floors up. I had no idea about how we were going to finish this entire museum in the time given to us because my mom was pretty slow.

I could tell you about all the paintings but I picked the good ones to share and ones that you must see. The first one is ‘The Potato Eaters’. At this point in his life Van Gogh drew more about the life of peasants than the rich merchants or aristocrats like other painters did. This painting showed how poor peasants made their own food when they tilled the land and actually earned this meagre meal that they could afford.

The next kind of paintings were his self portraits where he depicted himself differently in all pictures. He would change the colour of his eyes or the kind of hat he wore.

The third painting is his famous sunflowers. He used a lot of paint to make these sunflowers and the only colour he used was yellow. They were in different shapes and the amount of paint also varied and so did the mixtures of paint which made it look different.

One of the last paintings he ever made was the picture of the fields. He again had used a lot of yellow to describe the field. What is cool is that this was the same kind of field where he shot himself.

After three hours of going through paintings we broke for lunch, healthy burgers. To top of the burgers we got waffles and ice cream.

I found this next museum had me attached to its paintings. It was mainly surrounded around the famous painter Remebrant (I had never heard of him). We also saw famous paintings from other painters and we had a wide range of choices to choose from.

The first painting that I would like to touch upon is ‘The Battle of Waterloo’ by Jan Pieneman. It was huge and I really loved it because of its details. I love details more than colour and this was bang on. I loved how they showed the decisive defeat of the French leader Napoleon Bonaparte.

Let’s go to Remebrant and his famous painting ‘Night Watch’ describing a town’s militia ready in action to defend their home. Again he had the minute details which caught me in a trance.

Remebrant also was into self portraits and he made them when he was in different stages of his life-like when he was in his youth, middle age and old age.

Remebrant usually painted for aristocrats and was paid large sums of money to do so.

So that was it for the museums. Upon popular vote we visited the Secret Annexe, 13-year-old Anne Frank’ s house. Since the lines were too long we couldn’t go into it but we took pictures from outside. Anne lived here for two years with 7 other people in the constant fear of being hunted by the German Nazis as they were Jews.

After returning to Centraal station we decided to have dinner there and made our way back home.

 

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