The Rijksmuseum, The Rijksmuseum all wrapped up, I Amsterdam sign in the park
The Harbor Pilot leaving our ship, an oil derrick in the North Sea, Look carefully and you can see the wind turbines in the deep water
Sunday June 18th, 2010
Awakened for another big travel day, but the travel didn’t begin until late afternoon, so we had some more time in Amsterdam. Up, breakfast, and a plan to head out for a museum set the track for the day.
We boarded the tram at Westermarkt and tried to by another all day tram pass from the ticket agent on the train. She told us she couldn’t sell us one because it was a holiday, but I knew it wasn’t a holiday since I had just finished reading a list of Dutch holidays. So we paid for a hour ticket and rode downtown, waited for the main ticket office to open and bought the passes there. There wasn’t a holiday. We tried to get credit for the one trip pass we had been forced to buy but that didn’t work.
We went to the Rijksmuseum where guess what….half the building is wrapped in scaffolding and the protective mesh. The modernization of the building is beautiful, but it is only partially done and most of the collection is not available. We saw two wonderful doll houses, old and from a wealthy family so they were much larger than such things in the states. We went upstairs and saw many old masters: Rembrants, Da Vinci and so on—very pretty, but I think we are losing interest in Art collections as we have seen a few, and they blend together after a while. One interesting exhibit was the connection between Ver Meer, the Flemish master, and Juan Miro, the modern abstract painter. It seems that Miro spent many hours in Amsterdam studying the Ver Meer paintings and did some works based on them. The exhibit put the two paintings next to each other and showed how the realistic dog in the Ver Meer became a blue swatch of color in the Miro as so on. Being old fogies we much preferred the originals.
We visited all the parts of the museum that were open and then went outside to a beautiful day. We strolled through a small market in the park, had a hot dog and a coke in the park for lunch and decided to ride the tram since we had the pass. We took #14 south and east. We disembarked by the Osterpark, and walked through part or the park, watched two young men catch a large fish from the canal and release it. Then we got on a number 9 tram back toward city center where we connected to number 17 and back to our hotel to collect Pete and Jess and our luggage---or maybe they collected us. We caught the number 13 tram, so Pete and Jess could see the Dykstra building, and headed back downtown to the Victoria Hotel where we needed to catch our bus to the ferry port.
The bus was full…lots of people going to the ferry. The ferry port was a 35 minute ride from the center of Amsterdam. It took us through newer sections of the city and through an agricultural area and through another town. Even though we were in the center of the bus, we were some of the first people off thanks to a center door. Pete got our luggage from the storage compartment and off we went to queue up I do like the phrase “queue up.” It sounds like so much more fun than “line up.” We got our boarding passes, went through European Union customs and got our Dutch stamp in our passports with no problems at all. We made our way to our cabin on the 11th deck of the ship. It was a wee cabin, but it had four berths with Neil and Pete volunteering to take the top ones and an ensuite bathroom…what more did we need.
We left our cabin and proceeded to explore the ship. They had a wee casino with slot machines that took big denominations—1, 5, 10 ,20 euros—so we ignored them and our chance to become millionaires. It had duty free shops, perfume, jewelry, booze and weirdly duty free MM’s. We found out where the expensive eating points were and where we would eat—not the same places. We ended up on the outside near our cabin to watch the ship leave its port. It was quite crowded as pretty much everyone wanted to watch the activity. The shipping lanes were busy. We saw some ten additional ships as we left Holland, along with windmills—wind turbines way off shore and oil platforms. We had some dinner and then went on deck to drink some wine and worry about how rough the sea would become. Eventually we finished our wine and our companions on deck became more rowdy—it seems that Dutch young men and alcohol don’t mix much more politely than do young Scots, or Englishmen and alcohol. We climbed back down stairs and piled into bed. It was warm, we were tired, and the sea was calm so soon we were asleep.
This was also the day the camera fell out of Nancy’s pocket, hit the deck (about a 12” drop) and began making very strange and very bad noises.
14,414 Steps and a bus ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment