| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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We walked down one street Evelyn thought--from the map--was part of it (totally wrongly) and saw nothing. We realized we would have to kill some time. Since on these trips we are constantly behind in our log writing, this trip not being an exception, we looked for a place where we could sit down and write to pass the time until there was more happening. We were right night the square in front of the Royal Palace so we decided to walk there and sit down. It did not offer much in the way of something to sit on. Eventually we decided to have an early dinner. We found an Indonesian restaurant and each had chicken dishes. Through this effort we were able to pass the time until about 7 PM. We walked down a street that looked on our map to be one of the major red light streets but found it to be pretty tame. Eventually we decided that there really was not much of interest and since the street we were on led to the Central Station we decided to pack it in and return to the hotel to write. We did that. About 10 PM Dale and Jo returned. They had walked through the same district but on comparing notes they seemed to have seen different things so we asked them to show us what street they went down the following night.
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Tuesday morning breakfast was oddly reminiscent of the breakfasts we had Sunday and Monday, or at least the menu was.
Unfortunately, the City Historical Museum did not open until later so to pass time the four of us went first to the Bible Museum. Now I knew at the outset that this was asking for trouble. I suspected that the people who ran this thing were the same people who leave little Jesus-loves-you tracts in public restrooms. They also tend to come to people's doors on weekends. I have been told, incidentally, that when these people come to your door you must never talk to them or they will come back week after week. I have found this not to be the case. I enjoy discussing religion and will generally talk to these people. I am told that this is the exact formula for turning them on and getting them never to leave me alone, but for some reason they tend to leave after 45 minutes and do not come back for a year or two. But I would like to feel that the ones who have visited me have learned something about religion and are better able to question some of the things they have been told. If they have, I feel it is worth the time I have invested in them. In any case, the Bible Museum was more interesting than I expected, at least a little. It was not a Christian evangelical front as far as I could tell. In fact, the vast majority of the museum was devoted to the Old Testament. It seemed more intended that whatever you are now you would be more of. They seem to be assuming that if you are coming to a Bible Museum you are already a believer. The museum shows mostly how Bible research is done and some of the absurd conclusions that it comes to. They have, for example, models of ancient temples. The models implied that at least one of the temples would have been on the order of 4000 feet across. I frankly doubt that the Israelites built on scales that so much beggared the other cultures of the time. By pressing a button you saw a simulation of what the sun made the temple look like as the day progressed.
Perhaps the most unusual model was a lucite model of the Temple of Solomon. It was really a non-detailed sketch of the subject rendered in plastic to make it seem more modern perhaps. To my mind, however, it seemed just a bit too RAIDERS-OF-THE-lOST-ARKlike. While much of the interesting stuff was in Dutch, the museum was not without some interest, with fewer negatives and more positives than I expected.
Our big museum visit of the day was to be the Amsterdam Historical Museum. We got there, showed our museum cards, and then everybody decided they wanted to eat before going on. The cafeteria is dominated by a statue of Goliath roughly 18 feet high. There is also a statue of David next to it. This is the sort of kitsch one usually associates with America, but here it was in the Netherlands. I had a croquette and fries.
The museum covers the history of the city starting with an electronic map showing the expansion of the communities around the Amstel Dam and expanding out. Each fifty years was represented and there was a click of relays whose loudness increased with the size of area so you heard louder and louder clicks as the population grew--very dramatic. I expected a light to come on and say 'game over' or 'tilt' or something. There was a fair amount to see in this museum. It is a large museum laid out in chronological order so each room advanced you between forty and a hundred years. It starts with models of ships and with weapons in a tradition that is much like we would associate with the Vikings. We also see a crossbow hanging with an odd mechanism of ropes for leverage. They progress through the nautical tradition with navigation instruments. One very nice piece is a mural showing a scene of buildings and people in the street and a box next to the painting shows details of what is happening in the town and explains them. Here you see ships docking and their wares; there you see a man being taken to prison; in another corner you see someone selling patent medicines; somewhere else there is a rat catcher, etc. It is sort of a city tour in one painting. Further on there is a carillon display where you can actually play a carillon or hear carillon music from any of six town buildings. Eventually you get to the 20th Century with exhibits of union actions and war material.
Following this museum we went to see the Royal Palace, built in 1648 as the town hall, but appropriated in 1808 by Louis Napoleon to be used as a palace. The building is fancy to the point of garish with a sort of art that does not particularly appeal to me. I seem to remember cherubs and fat ancient gods and flowers. Dale pointed out at the debtors' office a relief of rats crawling over the coffin of a debtor chewing his unpaid bills, but that was about the only piece of art that was at all amusing. Not my style of art.
After the walk through the palace Dale and Jo were thirsty. So we temporarily left them at a cafe. Evelyn has been active for gay rights at AT&T (just picking it out as an issue she did not feel was getting sufficient attention) so she had some interest in seeing the Homomonument, a memorial to the homosexuals killed by the Nazis. We expected that to run over there, take some pictures, and be back would take about half an hour. It turned out to be much closer than we expected. They are three pink granite stone triangles about 35 feet on a side set in the ground to form the corners os a larger triangle. One of them is right next to the canal and has steps down. It actually forms a sort of stone pier.
After that we went back to the cafe. There we talked to Dale and Jo for a while and then set out looking for a good place to have dinner. It took a while to agree on a place. Dale and Jo wanted a place a little fancier than Evelyn and I really felt dressed for or wanted to spend for anf on top of that the menu did not look all that interesting. After more searching and farbling we all compromised on a sort of steak house. The food was pretty good though it was nearly impossible to get water. The water did not come until I had asked for it four or five times and after I had finished my entire meal. As I remember, we finished our meal at about 7 PM and we did not want to take the obligatory walk in the red light district until 9 PM, so we had about a two-hour wait. We walked around for about an hour. We stopped at a bookstore and Evelyn and Jo talked while Dale and I browsed. A couple of the books did interest me, but the cost of books in English here really is quite high. We walked around a little longer and were all getting cold so we stopped into a small restaurant for dessert. Evelyn and I had a pancake. In Holland a pancake is much like what the French would call a crepe except that it usually is a disk about a foot in diameter decorated with fruit and served with white sugar and/or treacle. (I guess treacle is molasses though I have not actually had that verified.) The dessert took up enough time so that it was about 9 PM when we finished. That was about the time to walk up and down the canal that has the main street of the district on either side.
I, of course, had heard for years about the classy red light district of Amsterdam with the women tastefully sitting in the windows. It is considered to be one of the major tourist sights. I have to say it was a minor disappointment. It has a little more class than New York's similar neighborhood (which we have to walk through whenever we park in the Port Authority), but that isn't saying much and I was less than totally impressed by what I had seen. It was a lot of women, mostly overweight, I think, sitting in their lacy underwear in windows. Except for the overweight part that was much what I expected, but it seemed to be forced. Many wore the same white outfits that looked much like swimwear that glowed under black light. It was as if they had been organized by one consortium and it was pretty much an 'if you have seen one you have seen them all.'
There were various clubs along the walk with hawkers out front who were quite good at guessing the nationality of the groups walking by. One called to us in French, but all the rest recognized that we were English speakers.
From there we walked back to the hotel. Our last evening in Amsterdam was over.
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Wednesday morning I awoke early. Our shower had the same problem our similar shower in Nanjing had: the drain clogged. And, of course, since the entire bathroom floor is the floor of the shower, the whole bathroom floor flooded, bathmat and all. Lovely surprise.
Breakfast was much like it had been the previous day. This last morning in Amsterdam we visited the City Municipal Museum. Not bad for a city municipal museum. They have the Chagall painting Evelyn calls 'The Fiddler on the Roof.' And they had a groundbreaking painting by Piet Mondrian. He always does horizontal and vertical black lines and colored rectangles. But this was really a unique painting for him since he did it on a square rotated 45 degrees. So if you are willing to count the edges of the canvas, there are actually diagonal lines in the painting. It was nice to see that he had mastered his fear of non-horizontal and non-vertical lines. That's the great thing about Mondrian: he was always willing to shock his audience by putting in a rectangle of a different color or of different dimensions than he had put in before. I feel certain had he lived he might have re-invented the triangle!
Another interesting piece is a piece called 'The Old Beanery,' which is a walk-in piece of art. On the outside it is a big metal box, but if you walk inside it is a bar and cafe except all the people (but one) have clocks for heads. Very strange.
The museum cafeteria has what almost looks like a dinosaur made out of metal parts. He is bellowing for food with a giant fork in one hand and a spoon in the other. Actually very funny.
We finished up with textile art, but it left me cold. About half the museum was closed for renovation. At the museum we said good-bye to Dale and Jo, who were staying in Amsterdam another night. We returned to our hotel, picked up our luggage, and took a tram to the train station where we grabbed the train for the Hague and for the 48th World Science Fiction Convention. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
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