Amsterdam again...

Train up to Amsterdam yesterday. Part of me felt almost too tired to tackle what I knew would be the busy-ness of Amsterdam (seven weeks of constant exploring, navigating, absorbing, walking, walking...takes its toll) but I felt I couldn't leave Holland without returning to Amsterdam - my first visit (this time round) having been focused solely on the galleries.

So I fled the hoards of tourists around the palatial Amsterdam Centraal Station and the medieval Old Centre and wandered the canals and side streets of the Canal Ring. The Canal Ring is on UNESCO's World Heritage List as an area of 'outstanding value'

The historic urban ensemble of the canal district of Amsterdam was a project for a new ‘port city’ built at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. It comprises a network of canals to the west and south of the historic old town and the medieval port that encircled the old town and was accompanied by the repositioning inland of the city’s fortified boundaries, the Singelgracht. This was a long-term programme that involved extending the city by draining the swampland, using a system of canals in concentric arcs and filling in the intermediate spaces. These spaces allowed the development of a homogeneous urban ensemble including gabled houses and numerous monuments. This urban extension was the largest and most homogeneous of its time. It was a model of large-scale town planning, and served as a reference throughout the world until the 19th century.

It is difficult to do justice to in photos and I found myself looking for details...

Note the hooks projecting from the top stories. 

Elderly gent sitting on his steps, smoking a cigar and watching the world go by

I went into the Begijnhof.

This enclosed former convent dates from the early 14th century. It’s a surreal oasis of peace, with tiny houses and postage-stamp gardens around a well-kept courtyard. The Beguines were a Catholic order of unmarried or widowed women who cared for the elderly and lived a religious life without taking monastic vows. The last true Beguines died in the 1970s.

Enclosed entrance

Always, however, it comes back to the water...and the bikes...and the gables...

You would need weeks, months, to explore Amsterdam properly and my photos don't do justice in any way to its magnificence. Just a taste...

More art...

On Friday I returned, for the first time since 1980, to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh - have all been commodified to the extent that it can be difficult to see past the countless lousy reproductions and brash commercialism. But, despite the crowds and the queues and the kitschy museum shops, I cried when I got to the Rembrandts in the Rijksmuseum and I walked round the Van Gogh Museum with tears falling freely.

By posting reproductions which in no way do justice to the originals, I am complicit in the commodification - but I can't help it. I need to try and explain, in words and images, why I feel the way I do. I have only posted two paintings from the Rijksmuseum - so many others I could have chosen.

Quite apart from his technical brilliance and his ground-breaking use of light and shade, it is the depth of humanity in Rembrandt's portraits that is so moving. Here is a man who understands people - the painterly equivalent of Shakespeare. Especially he understands old age...

Rembrandt also understands emotion. The Jewish Bride is one of the most tender and glorious paintings I know. It goes well beyond the mere technical requirements of a commission to represent love and care and (perhaps?) apprehension - the human condition. I kept circling back to the Rembrandts and had trouble leaving the gallery because of this.

The queue outside the Van Gogh museum was a mile long (this being the high tourist season) and I am not a queue person, but I hung in there. And this time I saw more clearly than ever before the literal and symbolic passage from dark Holland to sunny France to the angst that is so clear in the sinuous lines of the final paintings just prior to his suicide. Here is a man who risked everything, including his sanity, for what he believed in. Who so wanted to sell a painting - and never did. Who saw beauty in the simplest things and who conveyed utter joy through his use of colour. Reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings always disappoint. They fail to capture either the intensity of colour or the texture.

Gaugin's chair

I remember a Post-Impressionist exhibition in London in 1980 which I went to with Shirley Tetley. I couldn't leave. I went back and back to the Van Goghs. They were magnetic.

Getting there - the Kiwi flew too...

Phew! PHEW!! The non-flying kiwi is a sensible bird...

It's now very early Tuesday morning (Netherlands time) and the timeline since very early Sunday morning (NZ time) goes something like this...

Up 3.00am. Final preparations. Feed chooks (in dark), feed cats, feed Possum (cat) up the road. Leave Governors Bay at 7.00am to pick up Claire in Opawa and out to airport. At airport, as requested, THREE hours before departure. Flight late leaving. Ten+ hours flight to Singapore on Singapore Airlines. Five hours wait in Changi airport. Twelve+ hours to Frankfurt on Lufthansa. Two hour wait at Frankfurt after lengthy, snaking queue through immigration. One hour flight to Amsterdam, also Lufthansa. Find train station below airport. Try and pay for train ticket to Den Haag - machine won't accept my carefully pre-loaded with Euros ANZ Travecard. Top of a LONG queue of busy people with functioning cards. Lovely, patient Dutch lady who coped cheerfully with my post-flight miasma and incipient distress. Mastercard to the temporary rescue. Train to Den Haag Central, them tram from the centre to Rijswijk where Lauren and Merel met me at the tram stop and we walked a short distance  Bilderdijklaan 35. My 'travel light' policy pays dividends.

Random flight observations: the food on Singapore Airlines (for airline food) was delicious; the food on Lufthansa was crap. ChCh-Singapore leg sat next to an Indian couple, from New Delhi, who had just spent three months with their son and daughter-in-law and 2 1/2 month old grandson in Christchurch. The son teaches at the University of Canterbury. Small world. On the Frankfurt-Amsterdam leg sat next to a little (maybe Turkish?) girl of about six or seven, who was separated from her father up ahead. Such a lovely, self-contained, serious little lass who gently but firmly demonstrated that she didn't need any help to do the airplane stuff and who rewarded me with a beautiful smile as we disembarked. This is one of the reasons I love to travel - to experience the rich variety of the world, be reminded of how diverse and yet connected we are.

And back to Den Haag. Such a warm welcome from Lauren and Merel who leave this morning for Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Met Merel's parents and several friends who dropped in, met much loved cats Nina and Lasse, had a short walk to the local shops, tried to deal with my email - grrrrrr, server won't recognise my webmail account, meaning I can receive but can't send email messages. Working on that. All this in a haze of serious flight fatigue...  But I am here. Intact.

To those of you who might be reading this and who have sent emails, I'm sorry I can't reply right now. I have read your messages :-)  I may be able to find a location where I can access webmail. And/or I am working on setting up a Gmail account...

Photos haven't been a priority so far, but a couple to finish with...

'Upright' bikes outside local shops. I was taken by the pink plastic carry-box!

Lasse commandeers my bed-in-the-making