Purpleturtle's travel blogs:
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Amsterdam van Gogh museum and misc.
Entry 5 of 7 | show all | print this entry |
Our last day in Amsterdam, we packed up and checked out of our apartment (a delightful ground floor 1 bedroom apartment on Herenstraat, between the main city center and the Jordaan, run by 2 really great, helpful, and immensely entertaining guys! Check out their Maes & Heren B&B website. I will definitely stay there again.) We then took the tram to the Museum district to the van Gogh museum. We had purchased our tickets online in advance and printed them out, so we didn't have to stand in line at all! We paid the 10 euros extra to also be able to see the Rembrandt/Caravaggio exhibit that is going on in the exhibition wing of the museum. This was a great exhibit, although fairly small. I think there were only about 30 paintings. But it was a great exhibition, with Rembrandt and Caravaggio paintings with similar themes shown side by side, and the free audio guide gave detailed comparison and contrast of the different works. Very interesting.
The Van Gogh museum itself is a fantastic museum for someone who normally doesn't like art museums, or doesn't know that much about art or Van Gogh. It's a very manageable size, it flows very naturally and keeps you engaged by going through the artist's life chronologically, showing you pieces of art that epitomize certain periods of his life along with his story. My mother however, is very interested in and knowledgeable about art, and she knows a lot about Van Gogh and has seen a lot of his work, so she was less impressed. Personally, though, I think it's one of the best museums I've seen.
After the museums, we stopped at a shop Mom had seen that struck her fancy, a shop by the flower market that sells all sorts of interesting prints, particularly maps, prints of drawings of plants, flowers, etc as well as prints of Amsterdam and Holland pictures and lots of other interesting pictures. We bought some souvenirs there, then got on the tram to go back to the B&B to pick up our luggage and head out of town.
We did have an interesting adventure on the tram, however, when a very intoxicated man in a military camouflage outfit with a Netherlands flag on the shirt got on the tram, screaming and yelling loudly and belligerently to someone outside the tram. This "someone" came up and spat in his face while he was yelling, before the tram doors closed. The drunk man then started shuffling around on the (very very packed) tram, muttering loudly in Dutch about how he hated Moroccans. He was running into people and making everyone very uncomfortable, and they stopped the tram and asked him to get off. Before he could get off though, a man (I couldn't tell if it was the same man who had spit in his face) ran onto the tram and started attacking the drunk guy. People started streaming off of the tram car (us included) while the drunk guy kept yelling "I'm not afraid of you! I'll kill you!! Quite interesting. We hung back and watched for a while; the tram stayed stopped and tram traffic was backed up for quite a while. Eventually we tired of the drama and serendipitously found a bead shop I'd been trying to find. It was very exciting, until we realized that the shop kind of sucked (lots of bead shops do in Europe; not sure if their supplies are more expensive or if it's just not that popular of a hobby here, or what....)
Anyway, after a few more shopping stops, we finally made it back to the B&B building, said a final goodbye to our hosts Vlad and Ken, and took a taxi to the central station (Not a long walk, but "we" had a LOT of heavy heavy luggage), hopped on a train to Dordrecht, where Mike picked us up and drove us back home (He had been nearby on business for the afternoon, so it worked out well.
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