8/3/09

We woke up and had breakfast, good again. It was another incredibly nice day outside, no clouds in the sky and the sun was out. We expected it to be rainy, so we made it our museum day.

We went up to the roof of Nemo, their science center than looks like a boat. It was notoriously known as the place where a woman high on mushrooms jumped off of. It was a real nice view of the city, especially with the sun out.

We made out way down to the Anne Frank House. We were lined up outside around the corner, so I had a chance to look at the Renee Descartes house, which was just around the corner. I wonder if Anne knew about that. Anyways the museum was good. They had a lot of video, all of which was great. It was from people that knew Anne, including a lady that worked in the warehouse and her father. They were about two minutes long and started up after 10 seconds, incredibly well done.

Much of the house was empty, at the request of Anne’s father. They were devoid of all furniture, so it was sparse. I kind of wish they had more of the furniture and whatnot there to get a real idea of what it was like. But I suppose it was better than fake interiors (more on that later).

The best part of the house was the annex where behind the bookshelf the family lived during the war. They had marks charting the two girls’ height as well as the photos that Anne cut out of the magazines to decorate her room. It was a moving museum, I want to read the book.

We then went to the Rembrandt house and museum. He bought the place for a ton of money, until he went bankrupt about 20 years later. Unfortunately, almost nothing was original, instead replaced with objects that were like the things that would have been in the rooms. So nothing was really real.

They did have some paintings that were sold my Rembrandt, but none of his actual paintings. They did have a number of his etchings, which were good and all, but just not all that exciting. They’re small and monochromatic, and after about the first hundred, there’s not all that much to see.

After that we went to the Hansel and Gretel café on the way to the Van Gogh Museum. It was good, I had French bread with mozzarella, tomato, and pesto and tea. Another solid meal.
The Van Gogh Museum was tremendous. The paintings chronologically followed his career (which was incredibly short). Much of his early work looked nothing like a Van Gogh as we think of it, dark and rather conventional. He was even influenced by Asian art, something I never expected. They had even Asian symbols in some of the paintings.

They had some major paintings like The Bedroom, some self-portraits, one of the sunflower paintings, among others. They had about 200 in total.

Upstairs they had paintings from his buddies like Toulouse La-Trouc, Paul Gauguin, among others. I think it was so cool that they were just hanging out and painting. A lot of the times they had paintings of the same scenes, it was interesting to see the different styles.

Downstairs was the best part, and we didn’t realize it until the very end. They had a special exhibit of Van Gogh at night. His art of the nighttime is by far my favorite. And they had Starry Night on loan from the MoMa. I liked it a lot more than I remember when I saw it in New York. The other night paintings were also awesome. I was impressed, I could have spent hours looking at it.

After the museum we went to the square where they had the life-size chess pieces. There were two guys in a pretty competitive battle, and maybe ten people gathered to watch. I was the only one in the group that really knew how to play, so we stayed for about 15 minutes.

We then headed back to the square where we at the Pancake Corner/Sports Café. I was hoping they’d have some WBC on (my column is about it) but they only had football and some Bruins/Rangers. I had a hot chocolate and a pancake with ice cream, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream. It was about the size of a pizza. It was definitely better than the first pancakes we had.

We hung out there for a while before meeting up with the rest of the group for the first time all day. We went to a coffee shop for a little and then we all dispersed, we decided to head to the Red Light District to kill some time. Unlike the night before, I didn’t find this time as interesting. The surprise and the whole experience of it had worn off, it was just sort of, hm, disturbing maybe? It wasn’t necessarily dangerous or bad or anything, it just felt very trashy. It is about 90% men that hang out there, so Heidi and Kim were not really liking it that much. Brett and Dan were having a good time walking around and joking, but we just sort of left for the train station after maybe an hour.

Heidi lost her debit card, so we had to deal with that at the station. We checked out bags into a locker there in the morning and picked them up about 20 minutes before the gate would have closed on us.