First impressions of Amsterdam

  Amsterdam, Netherlands
Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Hey:
Landed in Amsterdam's airport with Elaine at around 6:45am. Several tries trying to buy train tickets. Several more tries trying to get on the correct train from the airport to Central Station. We asked a few people and everyone spoke much more English than we did Dutch. I would think that might be embarrassing, but it's not really. Most of the Dutch seem to speak English as a second language. This held true countless times all during the day.
 The Milk Maid by Vermeer
Went to the Rijksmuseum. It is the home of many paintings by the  masters of the Dutch golden age (mid 1500s to the late 1600s). This was when the Dutch were the monsters of global trade. Their ships ranged from Japan, the Philippines, and China, around the Spice Islands (the Moluccas, modern day Malaysia, Sumatra, Indonesia), through India, modern day Sri Lanka, the Maldives (where they skilleted the Dodo Bird to extinction) around the Horn of Africa (where the Boers still reside), and finally, back along the Guinea Coast of western Africa.  Then, they got a serious wild-hair and joined Spain, France, and England in North America, bargaining the now famous  (though painfully inaccurate) 25 bucks for Manhattan. Hard to believe today they were once the economic team to beat; but the Rijksmuseum is an awesome warehouse of what the Dutch were once capable of. You can see scale-replicas of the 74 gun man-o-wars that used to protect their fat piggy fleets loaded with the greatest assortment of spices, oils, fabrics, porcelains, and sweet woods that the 17th century western world had ever seen.
There were plenty of Rembrandts and Vermeers to oooh and aaah over, especially the wall sized "Nightwatch" that is considered Rembrandt's finest. The things that make Dutch paintings of this period so brain-numbing are the infinite, realistic detail (garments look like you could touch them and feel what the wearer felt on their skin), the incredibly fine brush strokes (the paintings look like photographs --- you have to look at them from an angle to see the brush work and the sheer attack of great volumes of expensive, linseed-mixed pigments), and the way these subjects emanate from the shadows (a southern Renaissance-- i.e. Da Vinci-- influence). Realism and non-religious subjects; in fact, landscapes, still-lifes, and scenes from normal, everyday life create the portfolio of the northern Renaissance. The Rijksmuseum was a fantastic portal back to this heady time in global cultural diffusion.

We sampled some of this global Dutch influence this evening as we visited an excellent Indonesian restaurant on Damstraat: Sukasari. There are plenty of Indonesian eateries in the 'Daam (due to intense Dutch trade during the time in history I just spoke of), but Sukasari came highly recommended by the proprietor our hotel. Elaine's a vegetarian and always (whether or not she wants to admit it) faces the challenge of finding something new and delicious to grub on when we go out. Well, an Indonesian specialty is the Rijsstaffel (pronounced Rice Taw-ful). It means rice table. We received a large bowl of steamed white rice and, surrounding it like jewels, about ten vegetarian dishes made up of curries, spiced steamed veggies, roasted tofu, and marinated tempeh. It's 22 Euros for one person, but you have to purchase two in order to get it. It was so tasty. Spicy, flavorful, wonderful textures that pleased every culinary sense. I washed it down with mango juice, at first. That was sweet and good. But I switched to Lychee Fruit juice and I have never had such a delicate, lightly sweet, thirst-quenching juice on ice before. We had been looking forward to a rijstaffel for a long time after reading guidebooks and watching videos on Amsterdam. Sukasari lived up to the hype!

We strolled a mile over to the Anne Frank House tonight just to check out the neighborhood. 'Laine's got a teacher from an American School in Rotterdam coming to join us tomorrow at the museum. We'll then interview her for Elaine's blog and grant in order to find out how 8th grade Netherlands students learn about Anne Frank, the Nazi occupation, and the Holocaust.

Elaine and I are both suffering badly from jet lag. We took a nap in the sticky humid early afternoon. Luckily, a nice thunderstorm rolled in and cooled things off long enough for us to get three hours shut-eye. We will walk a bit more around town and call it a day (actually two days, because we've been awake for all but three of the past 36 hours).