Amsterdam

This past weekend was our first mini-vacation on this trip.  We left on Friday morning around 9:30am, were in Amsterdam before noon.  I found a great B&B via TripAdvisor (the Tulipa -- definitely recommend it), which was convenient to everything, and just headed all over town. Unfortunately, while I've figured out how to get pictures off my phone, I took this weekend's pictures with my 'real' camera, not my phone, and I don't have the right cable to pull those off.

We visited the Van Gogh museum (more than I ever wanted to know about his life, and lots of his best paintings), the Rijksmuseum -- full of paintings from the "Dutch Golden Age" (17th century), especially Rembrant, but also Vermeer, Hals, Steen and others.  In that area there is also the Stedelijk museum, Amsterdam's modern art museum.  The impressionists and early 20th century paintings were quite minor and not impressive (a couple of good Mondrians, though), and the design section was quite local and of the sort that makes me think "form over function". Cute but who would ever use those objects?

There is a branch of the Russian Hermitage museum in Amsterdam (which I didn't know before researching this trip), but with all the fantastic stuff they could have sent from the Hermitage, right now there is an exhibit about Peter the Great, who spent quite a bit of time in Amsterdam learning various types of engineering, from shipbuilding to tooth pulling.  Sort of boring artifacts from his life. Not what we were hoping for.  

We did miss probably the best known Amsterdam site -- the Anne Frank House.  I had advance tickets, but I managed to get them for the wrong day, so we couldn't use them.  There's definitely a usability problem with their web site, probably at least in part because I'm not used to reading dates in the European style.

We also hit several old sites, the best of which was the Beguinhof, a courtyard of old houses (leaning, as many Amsterdam houses do) that was originally a place for widowed and unmarried women to live -- they owned their own houses -- and to work as lay sisters with the poor. Eventually, this became less of a desirable option for unmarried women, and in this century, a non-profit bought the courtyard and rents the houses to poor women.  The place is still lived in only by women.  Even though these are private residences, tourists are allowed into the gardens. The courtyard contains the oldest remaining house in Amsterdam -- one of the few wooden houses left standing after a disastrous fire.

We, of course, had to try the local herring from a kiosk.  Tasted about how lightly pickled herring tastes in the US, but much fresher.  We wandered in the Jordaan area, an upscale residential and shopping district.  Overall, we covered enough of the inner city and canals that I think I could give directions to tourists.

We headed back to Duisburg about 4pm Sunday, returning tired but having thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. This coming weekend we visit our host here, whose home is in Köln, 40 minutes away. These trips are definitely the high point of this visit.