Museums Galore!

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  Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Sunday, September 5, 2010

Today we visited only museums, sounds rather boring but was super interesting and extremely tiring! We passed by the local bakery first to pick up some tasty croissants for lunch and took the tram over to Museumplein. We started at the van Gogh Museum where they house over 200 pieces of his paintings plus numerous sketches. The collection was set up in chronological order to display his influences, artistic development, and the people that he had influenced himself. It was cool to learn that he created over 900 works in just 10 short years! They didn't have many of his most famous pieces but it was still a very great collection.
Right next door happened to be the House of Bols, the oldest distillery in the world, which opened in 1575 and an interactive museum of tastes and smells. It was actually our favorite museum overall and second favorite to our bike tour. The museum showcased the spices, oils, and other ingredients that went into making Bols liqueur and genever (something that gave rise to gin in England). We got to smell and guess the 36 liqueur flavors in a neon rainbow room! But sadly we sucked at it and got only eight correct. However, we did get to try a specialty cocktail and have two liqueur tastings for our failed efforts :). We were so blown away with the exhibit and the taste of the alcohol that we bought a starter set that included three bottle of liqueur, a bottle of genever, a little shaker, a muddled, and a cocktail recipe book! We were super happy with our purchases until we realized that we'd have to schlep all that around to the next seven cities...
Ok, after that was lunchtime with our croissants and the ever present pigeons in the parks. We then quickly went through the Diamond Museum and learned about the history of diamond mining and cutting. It was a decent museum; the best part was a skull diamond encrusted skull at the end of the exhibit.
So finally our last stop was the Rijksmuseum. This place has been under reconstruction for over seven years for asbestos so much of their collection is in storage or loaned to other museums. They created a small and very condensed museum next door to still display the most prized works. The artifacts and Dutch paintings were pretty impressive but nothing compared to the rather large collection of Rembrandt portraits. I had never really understood the popularity of his work until I saw the immense attention to detail and the very fine brush strokes that he used to create a seamless and beautiful piece of work. Very impressive.
After all this, we were both pooped. While Barry went back to the hotel to rest his aching legs, I went souvenir shopping of course! For dinner we decided to try Febo, a fast-food joint where you get your meal from vending machines. Yes, vending machines. And the food isn't that bad surprisingly! Nothing gourmet or anything, but for €3.90 it was rather decent, cheap food. We returned to our hotel early so we could pack and get ready for our next stop- Berlin! Plus, we get to spend the next three cities with the awesome Kelly Roy, yay!
P.S. We finally remembered to use the pedometer and we walked about 34287 steps in two days. We figured at 2.5 ft per step that's about 16 miles! No wonder we are so tired.

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Diamond encrusted skull	Jewish Quarter	Smelling the rainbow of liqueurs at Bols	Trying some Liqueurs
Van Gogh Museum

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