Touring Amsterdam

Today we had a great day walking around Amsterdam. We figured out how to take the train system today, saving much money and time. Our first stop was the Rembrandt house. This was the house Rembrandt bought in 1639, but was later sold when he went bankrupt. He was already famous at this time, but did paint some of his paintings here. Unfortunately, we ended up not paying to go on the tour, but it was interesting to see the outside.

We then went to the Anne Frank house, but again, didn’t go in due to the huge line. We’ll be going back there tomorrow morning when it first opens, so more about that tomorrow.

After more walking and looking at all the wonderful buildings, we finally got to the Van Gogh museum. This building houses more than 200 paintings, most by Van Gogh. For those of you who know something about art, there are also paintings done by Gauguin, Millet, Rembrandt, Monet and others. They also had a special exhibit of paintings by John Everett Millais. He’s the person who painted Ophelia, a work inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Now as most of you know, I don’t know much about paintings and artists. To be real honest, I didn’t get most of the van Gogh paintings. He was an evangelist, a teacher, an art dealer, and then decided at 27 he’d like to be an artist. He took up painting, and the museum proceeds to walk you through his 10-year art career, which ended tragically when he took his own life. The museum shares where he got his inspiration, and then shows how he progressed in his learning of various painting techniques. At the risk of sounding total uninformed (and probably ignorant), while it was an interesting journey to watch him learn to paint, I still wasn’t able to appreciate the greatness of his technique by the end of the exhibit. I did learn that he did several paintings heavily influenced by Japanese designs. I think these were his best and most interesting, but I’m not sure real art professionals would agree.

On the other hand, the Millais paintings were amazing. They were more like photographs done in oil. While I will probably never understand the nuance of color, style, technique of all this art stuff, I could certainly appreciate the technique and the beauty of the paintings. If you want to see more of what I’m talking about, check out the link to the museum at www.vangoghmuseum.nl.

We also had time to take a canal boat for about 1 hour all around the city. I was amazed at the number of house boats on the canals! The ride was wonderful and we were able to learn a bit about the city as we went. It was neat to be able to ride along and look at all the different buildings, many of which had dates showing they were built in the early 1600’s. You can also see over the years that many of them have started to settle, so some lean quite a bit. They lean both left and right, and from front to back. The style of the buildings throughout the city is just like the pictures you always see. I always wandered if those were just one small area, but in fact, the entire main city has similar architecture. Tomorrow, I hope to get a few more pictures of some of the buildings, and then when I can log onto the internet next, I’ll try to post some to this blog.
Tomorrow night, we are off to Dubai, UAE. That should be quite a culture difference! Our flight is overnight, and then straight to the meetings for the day. Hopefully, I’ll be able to log on and tell you about Dubai on Monday night. If not, then I’ll send you a note from Nairobi on Tuesday evening!