And I Feel Fine - Again

 

On the left, an installation by Willem Van Genk at the Amsterdam Hermitage museum. On the right, an installation by Sam Regan, the guy who's renovating our bathrooms.

 

On the left, Globe and Mail journalists take a stab at talking about climate change policy and what that means in Canada. On the right, hosts of the Daily Zeitgeist podcast, Miles Grey (on the left), Jack O'Brien (on the right), and some Canadian comic in the middle perform a two-hour swing through the year 2000, including a clip from Dick Clark's Rockin' New Years Eve, featuring a short interview with Donald Trump.

Which brings me to today's topic.

The world's most powerful crybaby seems to be taking the coronavirus personally. It's another hoax brought on by the left to undermine his chances for re-election.

This is the way the world ends: the sociopathic narcissists in charge overstate the risks that serve to make them politically powerful (caravans, for example) and understate the risks that show their essential weakness. So vast resources are spent chasing phantoms, while real perils (climate change, for example) go begging. 

***

Meanwhile, in Canada, on Friday night at the Great Hall, before the podcast heroes came onstage, their producer Anna Hossnieh stepped out to address the crowd.

She apologized, saying she was afraid she wasn't going to pronounce all the names right, but, she said, she wanted to do a land acknowledgement. 

The crowd - all youngsters - went wild. When she stumbled over some of the First Nations' names, people helped her by shouting out the correct pronunciation. When she was done, the audience cheered its approval. So the whole world's not broken.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Masks in a shop window, Amsterdam

Dutch Miscellany

Amsterdam is so complex it resists being put together in a tidy little narrative, so I'm not going to try.

What follows are some illustrative shots of Amsterdam. Where it may not be obvious, I try to explain why I took the photo or explain what's in it.

Hipsters 17th C Amsterdam style, Detail from a painting in the Rijksmuseum.

Lift bridge with graffiti

400-year old colossus at the Amsterdam museum.
He looks brand new (I imagine the sash is new),
and his moving parts - his eyes and his head - still move.

Many fine old buildings and some of the most charming spaces in Amsterdam evolved in a similar manner: they started as Catholic edifices (churches, monasteries, convents), and when Catholicism was criminalized, were transitioned to a charitable use such as an orphanage or a refuge for destitute old people (displaced nuns, say) and then, after the last old lady died, were made into a museum. So, the Hermitage Amsterdam used to be a home for women, the Amsterdam Museum used to be an orphanage. This is a photo of the entrance to the Amsterdam Museum off of Kalverstraat. The motto over the door is a request for alms for the benefit of the poor orphans within.

    Two propaganda posters on display at the Resistance Museum. On the left: a young boy asks his dead mother if this is the "second front" he had heard his father talk about, a warning against resistance fighting in the occupied Netherlands. On the right: a happy, secure, well fed family demonstrates the benefits of the man of the house working in Germany. I see the emotional impact of the picture's emphasis on the key in the door; I don't know what to make of the picture's treatment of the young girl.

  

Two Amsterdam houses. On the left: just about every house in the old part of the city has a hook attached to an I-beam extending from its top gable, for the very practical purpose of hauling stuff up to the upper stories. Even more practical is what is shown in this shot, where the facade has been cantilevered out about five degrees to give more room to the goods. On the right: This is Rembrandt's house. None of the reviews made it seem worth the bother to go in. We made the same choice for the Anne Frank house, which was too crowded and too sad. And everything in it was treated better at the Resistance Museum. In retrospect, we feel like we made the right choice.

This man spends his day in Dam Square, making bubbles for the amusement of tourists. On our tour on the 18th, we had a forehead-slapping moment when our guide explained that the name Amsterdam comes, in practical Dutch fashion, from the name of this place, which was where there was a dam on the Amstel river. Duh.

 

Two works by Banksy: Christ with shopping bags is strongly reminiscent of a woman's reproductive organs. The little guy painted under the window is in a lane just off of the Flower Market. We couldn't be sure, but we think there was actually a guard stationed nearby to make sure someone didn't make off with it.

 

Oddly over the top for the Dutch: one the left, a detail of iron fencing on the exterior on the Amrath Hotel - the gaudy showpiece of the Amsterdam School of architecture. On the right, a porcelain flower tower, one of only 35 left in existence and one of the four in the Rijksmuseum. 

 

Affection for animals: on the left, a parrot signalling the location of a secret Catholic church. On the right, a monkey with a telescope, just because.

 

The Dutch sense of humour: On the left: a poster for a family-friendly stage production called "Clean Your Plate", or, more literally, "Eat Your Plate Clean." We were charmed by the grotesque pile of brussell sprouts and the little girl's green face. On the right: an inexplicable poster in the middle of a construction zone.

 

Detail shots from a modern group portrait: on the left: a man up to his shins in potatoes with fish; on the right, two men make plucking a pheasant look disturbing. The full photo - on display at the Amsterdam Museum - showed all the members of a market guild.

 

Two images of children: On the left, at the MOCO, a photo of an art installation on the US/Mexico border. On the right, Cupid being stung by a bee at the Rijksmuseum.

 



Eye-catching: top photo, graffiti around the corner from the handbag and purse museum. Bottom photo: a "coffee" shop, unusual not just because of its decal-clad exterior, but also because of its location, which is far from where most of the rest of the shops are.

Getting really miscellaneous now: On the left, a Dutch "no junk mail" sign; on the right, a desperately precious chair designed by Piet Mondrian.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Just One Souvenir

Bruce by the Beetle Sphere - in a mall on Kalverstraat,
the oldest shopping street in A'dam.

 It's our last full day in Amsterdam. We wandered around just enough in the morning to work up a good appetite for all the eating we planned to do for the rest of the day.

We started at Sampurna. I made a reservation because all the tourist guides said without one, we'd never get in. That may be good advice for May or June. Not really required in February. Anyway, the rijsttafel was amazing. 

How you start a rijsttafel, with crispy chips and three dips:
mild, medium and super hot

How you end a rijsttafel:
eight empty dishes; two full humans

Then we went past Dam square to Rene's Croissanterie for the reportedly best churros in Amsterdam.

They were good. 

Once again we had read that the place swarms with people all the time ... except for when we were there, which suited us just fine.

Last museum stop ... the Cannabis Museum. We learned from our tour guide and noted in passing on our own that there is a museum for everything in Amsterdam, so of course there's a museum for pot heads, by pot heads about pot heads.

We had one more destination on our food tour of Amsterdam, Stubbe's Herring, just a few blocks from our hotel.

Just to be clear, Bruce is holding the herring roll on a bun so I can take a picture of it. He has no intention of eating it.

Approximately eighteen hours from now as I write, we will be back in the belly of a giant plane. Headwinds will make the return flight longer than the flight here, but at least we won't need to try to sleep.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

If you order your tickets to the Cannabis
museum on line, when you arrive they give you a gift bag
with a cannabis chocolate bar, a cannabis lolly
pop and a sticker. Of the three, only the sticker is
legal to bring back to Canada.

Priceless

Bruce at the Archives - the valves and gauges belong to the old boiler system
(the archives are housed in a former bank building).

I'd signed up through Expedia for a "small group" walking tour, which, I've learned, can mean anything.

Today it meant that Bruce and I were the only clients of our tour guide Kaylee, an ex-pat American art history major from Denver, Colorado. We had a blast.

The oldest house in Amsterdam. Looks pretty good for 450 years old. 

We covered in two hours what normally takes three, so we spent the last hour hanging out in the world's greatest little neighbourhood pub in the old Jordaan section, where Kaylee showed us her Homer Simpson tattoo.

He's wearing his reading glasses.

Then, after a lunch the absolute opposite of the one we had yesterday, we checked out the City Archives.

The "Treasure Room" holds a changing show of different items from the massive archive collection. It is housed in the old safe deposit box vault, which was designed to be grand and bolster customer confidence in the bank.

Among the treasures were documents associated with the Dutch East India Company (or VOC as it was called) sealed with many different wax impressions.

And the world's thickest book - which, of course, was associated with the slave trade.

And, 485 years ago to the day (February 11) of our arrival in Amsterdam, a bunch of anabaptists ran naked through the streets, convinced that Judgement Day was upon us all. 

They were wrong about that for everyone else, but their demonstration proved to be the last thing they ever did.

Having our very own tour guide meant she could take us directly to things I'd read about but had no idea how to find (the names of things and streets are complicated in Amsterdam). Kaylee took us to a couple of protected gardens that I'd longed to find, but despaired of ever being able to, and helped us find the "Pink Triangle" memorial, which we had walked by at least twice, without knowing it was there.

Now that we have seen so many sights we are starting to get them mixed up in our heads, we're going to focus for our last day in Amsterdam on eating: rijsttaffel and sweets - probably in that order but not at the same place.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Sunshine

Bruce with the Vondelpark Picasso. The artist said it was a bird; the locals call it a fish;
I thought it was a bull's head. You can see all three.

We've gone past the 120 hour mark on our iAmsterdam cards*, so we had to find other ways to amuse ourselves besides poking around in museums.

The forecast promised a decent morning, so we tacked through residential neighbourhoods and made our way to Vondelpark. 

 

On our way, there were spring flowers. In the park we found a tree that had been knocked down but it got up again.

Immediately after we left the park, the rain came. We ducked into De Spiegel (sinds 1907) for a decent lunch and waited out the storm. Bruce tried some "young" gin and I had a "Van Gogh" toasted sandwich with chicken, pineapple and curry sauce. What you can't tell from that last sentence was how tasty the sandwich was.

Bruce had food for lunch, too, but gin makes for a better story than a clubhouse sandwich (even if it had an egg in it). 

We had no hope for a fair afternoon. But, the weather gods smiled upon us. We saw more sun this afternoon than we've seen all trip.

Combination opera/city hall. The locals call it Amsterdam's false teeth.

So we went to the flower market again, and then to the Bridge of 15 Bridges (so called - a bit of a bust said Bruce), and then down to Central Station to take the 3 minute ferry across to the north end of Amsterdam, where we came upon a short row of quaint tiny houses.

Bruce has been added to show scale.

 And I got an even closer look at the bike parking facilities at Central Station.

We're hoping the weather holds tomorrow because we've booked a walking tour in the morning and, in the afternoon, we're going to the Amsterdam City Archive! 

Do we know how to have fun or what?

Thanks for reading!

Karen

*At least two readers will be anxious to know if we made our money back on our iAmsterdam cards. I did the math and, yes, we did. We got 93 euros, each, more in admissions than we paid for the cards, or $266 CAD total savings.