We slept a little later today. I ate breakfast in the room and got ready for our meeting time of 10am in the lobby. Then I continued to work on yesterday’s blog. I still wasn’t finished when it was time to go.
We walked to the Line 19 tram stop at Slotrdijk Station. It arrived within a few minutes and we tapped on. It dropped us in front of the Rijksmuseum. It was faster and cheaper than taking the private regional rail, Sprinter, to Central Station, then transferring onto municipal public transit. We used our phones or credit cards to tap on and off on the tram.
There were a lot of relatively modern homes along the tram route, and they all had hooks on the top floor for moving furniture in and out through the windows.
This bike is advertising group bike tours.
It was a short walk through the bike and pedestrian tunnel in the Rijksmuseum, to the Van Gogh Museum. Fortunately we bought tickets months ago because when we got to the ticket counter and gift shop there was a sign indicating tickets had sold out for the day.
The modern contemporary museum of Amsterdam, Moco Museum, had a few items displayed outside. It is between the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. There were several other museums in this area known as The Amsterdam Museum Quarter.
Once we knew where we needed to be at 11:45 we walked back through he park to where there were food stalls for coffee and/or treats.
This reflecting pool hasn’t been filled yet this year, but there was a small puddle that allowed me to get a reflection of the back of Rijksmuseum.
There were many planters of tulips beautifully in bloom in the Museum Quarter.
The entrance to the Van Gogh Museum leads to a well-lit subterranean level with exhibit space, bathrooms, lockers, and gift shop. It was one of three gift shops! The lockers were free to use.
Most of the bathrooms here have doors that completely enclose the stall top and bottom. This one was particularly clever because it had a red light over each door,which was locked and occupied. I haven’t seen these roll towels for a long time.
We agreed to check in on our group WhatsApp in an hour and separated, although we did keep bumping onto each other. Different pieces of Van Gogh’s art was projected in the top corner of the atrium. The museum had four levels.
The size of his pieces of art ranged from small canvases for the many self portraits he did to some very large canvases of landscapes.
Vincent Van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853. From 1869 to 1876. He worked for an art dealer. From 1878 to 1880 he worked as a lay preacher among the miners. He decided, at the age of 27, to become an artist and practised through drawing.
He takes drawing and painting lessons in 1881. Vincent spends three months in Hoogeveen and Nieuw-Amsterdam in the Drenthe countryside, where he paints and draws the landscape in 1883. He lives on and off with his parents during these years. In 1885 he studies for a brief period at the art Academy in Antwerpen. From 1886 to 1888 Vincent lives with his brother Theo he becomes acquainted with Neo-impressionist painting, and befriends Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard, and Paul Gauguin. In 1888 he paints Sunflowers, lives briefly with Paul Gauguin, and cuts off his ear.
In 1889 he admitted himself to a psychiatric institution. He produced an average of one painting per day in 1890. He shot himself in the chest and died two days later on July 29.
Theo Van Gogh, Vincent’s younger brother supported him and was able to do so from his work as an art dealer in Paris. Theo and his brother were very close as portrayed in this design for a monument to the Van Gogh Brothers.
“Theo died shortly after Vincent in 1891. His widow Jo was left with their infant son, Vincent, and hundreds of artworks and letters. It was Theo‘s dearest wish that his brother would gain recognition for his art and Joe saw it has her duty to realize that dream. She took charge of the estate and devoted her life to raising awareness of van Gogh art. She did this by organizing exhibitions, making strategic sales and publishing Vincent’s correspondence with Theo. It is partly thanks to her that Van Gogh’s oeuvre became known all over the world.”
They were initially buried separately, but Jo had her husband remains exhumed and buried next to Vincent’s.
In the gift and bookshop on the third floor. There was a self portrait of Vincent made out of pencil stubs. There was also an art piece of hanging paint brushes.
The museum also had Lego versions of a couple of van Gogh‘s works.
This is what the entrance to the museum looked like from the top floor of the adjacent building connected underground.
There was a special exhibit, entitled, yellow that contained many of his yellow works including one of his most famous Sunflowers. I included someone taking a picture of it for scale.
When Vincent wanted to play with colors, he often used wool rather than much more expensive pigments.
The museum, primarily showcase van Gogh’s work, but also showcase some of his contemporary, including this Kandinsky.
We all needed another half hour to finish the museum and then headed to a nearby café for lunch. Bathrooms are generally in the basement here and the stairs are often quite steep and twisted.
This is how the bathrooms were labeled.
A few doors down from the restaurant was The Leica Store. I recently read that some of these stores have free photography gallery in them and was pleased to learn that Amsterdam was one of the places that had one. I had added it to my Google maps list of things to do in Amsterdam. At lunch, I opened up my list on the map and chose the number of the things on it that were nearby.
After the photography gallery, Alina, Mark, and Cindy went to MOCO while I lead the others on a walk to see some of the things on my list.
We walked through beautiful Vondelpark, the largest park in Amsterdam, which states back to 1865. We came across two restaurants and these beautiful displays of floating flowers.
The number of people riding their bikes through the park was astonishing.
“The Amsterdam Monster Factory is a state of the art Augmented Reality /immersive educational tool for everyone. Brought to life as a fun quest through the city, it entails visiting nine animated AR storytelling installations, where the waiting Monsters tell the history of that location through the values that they represent, and connect it to the open minded spirit of Amsterdam.” This was one of the monsters. Because I hadn’t heard about it, and we didn’t have the option installed we weren’t unable to interact with it.
Our next stop was the home of Pierre Cuypers, architect of Central Station, and The Rijksmuseum.
Then we walked to the famous Lomanstraat where the trees are angled and meet in the middle. On the way, we passed through a neighbourhood of beautiful homes.
Amsterdam uses a network of underground, central collection bins for household garbage, reducing street clutter and odor. Residents sort waste (residual, paper, glass, plastic/packaging, organic) and use a digital pass to open designated neighbourhood containers. The bins are automatically emptied by specialized trucks.
This beautiful building is an old tram depot which dates back to 1893. It was built for horse drawn trams.
I couldn’t pass up, capturing this iconic Dutch scene.
This house had a fixture in the wall for chaining up their cargo bike.
This is the famous Lomanstraat. “is a quiet, picturesque residential street renowned for its unique canopy of, century-old, leaning London plane trees. These trees grow toward the center, forming a natural, tunnel-like effect that makes it one of the city’s most photographed, scenic spots, particularly in autumn.”
We then took two trams back to Slloterdijk Station where I couldn’t resist photographing all the bikes once again from an elevated level.
This bike is set up for carrying two children. One in front of the rider with a seat on the crossbar, and one with the seat on the rack.
We got back to the hotel a little earlier than usual today so that I could finish yesterday’s blog.
Other than at the highway service stations this is the first gas station I’ve seen in Amsterdam. We were on our way to dinner.
We went to a Turkish restaurant for dinner tonight. The food was delicious.
Tomorrow the group is splitting up again with Wayne, David and Dayle heading to a cheese auction. Alina and I are going to try riding bikes into Amsterdam‘s craziness. I’m not sure what Mark and Cindy will be up to. Perhaps I can get Cindy to guest blog about some of the things that she has done separate from me.
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