Amsterdam wanders part 2

There is very little in the way of tale to start of this second set of pictures from Amsterdam. Looking through them, they were mostly from the Thursday, when we had some unexpected blue skys. Back home I think they were being bombarded by some of the windiest weather for a long time and our landing back in Liverpool in the evening was less than smooth - a little hairy even - but let's not worry about that just now when there's delightful canals to wander along.

A boat shaped like a clog - unless some big fellow out there's lost a shoe in which case, it's in the canal.

We passed a building on one street which was being held up by three wooden struts on the pavement. As a little bit of decoration, they had attached the metal mushrooms to the struts.

This bell tower belongs to the Zuiderkerk or Southern Church. It was painted by Monet when he visited the city in 1874 - he must have been short of a few bob if he was having to do a bit of decorating to make ends meet. The internet says that the carillon plays on Sundays between 4 and 5pm but when we passed at 1pm on Thursday the bells were have a good run through a few tunes. We never saw the church itself but from the pictures on the net, the best bit is the bit you see sticking above the rooftops.

No curious camera settings here but this pictures seems to have turned out black and white (there is actually a tiny bit of colour in the dutch flag but I'm not sure you can see it on this shrunk to fit the internet picture)

 

The other direction, perfect technicolour?

Just outside the zoo (we only passed by) are a pair of golden eagles.

A tastefully decorated pillar......

....and a decorated pillar.

Oh, I think it must be time for a beer.

Refreshed and on our way to find a final bite to eat before we went to the airport, we passed the Fo Guang Shan He Hua Chinese Buddhist Temple. Completed in 2000 it's the largest Buddhist temple built in the Chinese style in Europe.

Not really a major stop but still time for a quick snap of the interior.

And finally, just before a large plate of lasagne, this rather creapy old doorway. Spes altera vitae translates as another hope of life. This is an entrance to Sint Olofskapel which was a church originally built between 1440 and 1450 - now it's used as a conference centre by the NH Barbizon Palace hotel.

Rembrandt's House

A few years ago we visited Rembrandt's house and to be quite honest, we came away a little disappointed. So it wasn't on our list of places for a return visit but we noticed, on wandering about the city, that there were posters up advertising Caravaggio at Rembrandt's house. Caravaggio is a cracking painter (so is Rembrandt of course) so we decided to give it another go. Rembrandt's house once again didn't fail to disappoint as the Caravaggio exhibition consisted of 1 painting but perhaps our lack of Dutch meant that we didn't pick this fact out of the poster.

Having said that they do have quite a few old masters on view and an  excellent collection of Rembrandt's etchings and then on the way out we passed another room with a most enjoyable collection of prints by Anneke Kuyper (which I'm going to cover in a later blog). And just to help matters along, they let you take pictures so by the end of it, I was quite glad I went in after all.

Without further ado, here's the Caravaggio. It is St John the Baptist Reclining and has been called the last Caravaggio. It is certainly one of his last paintings and is in a private collection, so whether it will be available to be seen anywhere after it's visit to Amsterdam, I do not know. It finishes it's stint here at Rembrandt's house the day after tomorrow. I've followed this with a small selection of Rembrandt's own etchings.

Amsterdam wanders part 1

I don't think I saw too much of that strange ballet that Easyjet like to call a safety briefing. I can't remember taking off at all and I came round to find us landing on the runway at Schiphol about an hour later. We'd driven through the night (or at least Bev had driven - I just sat there) to get an early flight from Liverpool so that we'd have most of the day in Amsterdam and we would manage fine on an hour's nap on the plane.

So after queueing at 4 separate train ticket machines at the airport unsuccessfully and managing to find the correct tram first time we found ourselves in the right area for the hotel and after a spot of breakfast, the Van Gogh museum (below), our next destination.

There are certain things in the world that you're not supposed to critise, a bit like Nelson Mandela or Neil Young, and I suspect that ol' Vincent holds that position in the art world. Even so I find Van Gogh a bit hit or miss, there are some excellent ones which just seem to hit the spot but much of the time he seems to be waving about trying out styles (I'm sure somebody will be around to arrest me in the morning). His painting below is of  Daubigny's garden - I put that one in particular up because there were two paintings in the gallery by Daubigny himself and one of them I really liked - it was of a sunset on the sea with waves breaking on the shore (unfortunately not available on the internet that I can find)

Apart from our visits to Rembrant's house and the Resistance museum which I'll be coming to later, much of Tuesday and Thursday were spent wandering about the city. It's a delightful city to wander in with it's canals and tall houses with lots of little quirky odds and ends dotted about. For a major city, it doesn't have all that many cars on the road and once you get a street or so back, it can be unexpectably quiet. To make up for this the city is awash with bicycles, also unexpectably quiet especially when they're nearly running you over before they ring their bell. They seem to run in the opposite direction from the traffic on cycle tracks that are nearly indistinguishable from the pavements. You'd think that to then throw an extensive tram system into the mix would make Amsterdam's streets a death trap but they at least are big and noisy and you'd be hard pushed not to see them.

On with the photos....

This photo says something about the bicycle to car ratio.

It's a cow on a window ledge.

A bad day!

The area round about the hotel, the museum district, has a wealth of magnificent doorway - I could have filled the camera with them.

An odd knocker

Some rather lovely pillars on an art shop building.

Me thinks this guy isn't getting anywhere. I took this picture while passing on the other side of the road. While having a surf later on to try and find out about it, I saw so many other statues in Amsterdam that I had never seen, I wondered if it was some other city I had been to.

A bear blowing bubbles.

If all the world's traffic barriers could be painted like this, wouldn't it be a nicer place.

Some of the old buildings make you wonder how they stay up.

It took a while to find this beer. The area around the museums and hotel are not chock a block with bars. I'm sure the owner of this establishment would rather have sold us food and it was a bit posher then we might normally have gone for - which you may be able to judge from the glass.

The hotel bar was much more to my liking. It had a very dark corner and with the fact we had lined up a little Caravagio for the next day in mind, Bev took this.

Esher in the Palace

I have to admit that I know very little about Maurits Cornelis Esher, which is a vast improvement on last week where I knew nothing about him at all. So when I wandered round to the Esher Museum in the Lange Voorhout palace, where Queen Emma lived until 1891, I had no idea what I was going to see.

Mr Esher (1898 - 1972) was the wild eyed bloke you see in on the right in an engraving he did of himself. In many of his prints he explores perspective and mathematical patterns but is probably most famous for his pictures of stairs that go round in a square apparently always upwards. For all I'd never heard of the fellow, I did recognise several of his pieces.

As I mentioned in the last blog, we arrived here a little too close to closing time to really do it justice. But on the plus side they did let me take pictures and have wonderfully unreflective glass on the pictures. Silly old me didn't take any note of the names of the pictures so you'll just have to do without. Neither for that matter did I photograph the building on the way in but I can assure you that for all it bears the title of palace, it was really just a great big town house - quite unexciting by Dutch standards.

He dabbled in the area of physical illusion as well

I've probably blown this one by sticking my camera into it but by the use of mirrors and repeating patterns this appears to be a hole which goes down (and up) for ever.

Almost every room in the palace contains a rather bizarre chandelier by Dutch artist Hans Van Bentem. Here are just 3.

Back to Esher to finish off with a couple of our favorites.