Dutch Treat, Part 2
Great Art at Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum
By Lewis Nolan
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The breakfast buffet at the Jolly Hotel Carlton was
excellent. I had ham and bacon on fresh, coarse bread with a couple of slices
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of tomato on the side. Betty, always a light eater in the
morning, went for a chocolate croissant and a cup of coffee.
There was a long serving table in the cheerful and bright banquet
room that was loaded with various meats, eggs, breads, pastries, cereals, fruit
and juices. We snagged a couple of rolls and a bit of ham and cheese for later
snacks. Our table was next to a large window overlooking the busy Vijzelstraat
beneath. We enjoyed our leisurely breakfast then embarked on one of the city
walks recommended by guidebook author Rick Steves.
We walked a fairly direct route to Amsterdam’s two greatest
art museums. One destination is the national gallery, called the Rijksmuseum. It
is the depository of many great works of art by Dutch painters and sculptors of
Holland’s Golden Age. The other is a modern addition to the central city, the
Van Gogh Museum. It houses the largest collection of Vincent’s paintings in the
world along with work from other Impressionists.
We walked through the Blumenmarkt, or “Floating Flower
Market,” directly beneath our hotel room. We talked to a large Dutchman, about
my size and age, whose son now owns one of the larger greenhouse-barges. He
told Betty that he could “certify” bulbs for shipment to the United States with
some special packaging. She wasn’t interested in the dozens of varieties of
tulip bulbs offered for sale; the tulips are already blooming in Memphis at
this time of the year so it is way to late too plant.
But Betty was interested in some grapefruit-sized bulbs that
produce huge blossoms of white Amarylis, a color and variety we’ve not seen
back home. She revisited the shop later in the week and bought several of the
gigantic bulbs. We were somewhat disappointed that the shop’s bulb sorters were
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not any better at sorting than those who supply Home Depot
back home. Betty forced the bulbs in pots upon our return to Memphis. But in
late April, huge RED blossoms bloomed rather than the expected white.
One of the first stops recommended by Steves for this
particular walk is a fresh herring stand on a square called “Koningsplein,”
across a busy street from the Flower Market. This is where locals flock to eat
raw herring. We watched a woman gut and filet the fish but passed on sampling
the Dutch delicacy. We walked several blocks up the shop-lined street. Some of
the retailers are branches of ritzy chains with familiar names but most seem to
be locally owned, like the Metz & Co. department store. Trams ply two sets
of tracks in the Leidestrat and politely make way for the hundreds of cyclists
that ride in a special bike lane in the middle of the street. Sidewalks on
either side of the street were crowded with walkers on this cool but pleasant
Sunday afternoon.
All the shops were open and most seemed to be doing a good
business. One is named “When Nature Calls Smartshop,” which would be called a
“head store” back home. It sells marijuana seeds and other pschotropic drugs.
The guidebooks warn the clueless that while such products are legal they are
not necessarily safe and in fact can cause powerful and unpleasant reactions.
We proceeded to one of the most lively squares in Amsterdam,
called “Leidseplein.” It reminded us of Paris, with café tables spilling out
onto the sidewalk. Street entertainers worked the crowd. There is something to
eat for just about every taste, with “restaurant row” featuring Thai,
Brazilian, Indian, Italian, Indonesian, Dutch and even American foods –
including Burger King. For those wanting more of a “kick” with their meal,
there is the “Bulldog Café and Coffeeship.”
The Bulldog is a signature establishment and flagship of a
small chain that is licensed to sell marijuana. It has a large head of a
ferocious looking English Bulldog (perhaps five feet in diameter) mounted above
the door of the former police station, complete with red light bulbs for eyes.
Betty informed me that one sign of pot smoking among her high school students
back home is the presence of red, bloodshot eyes. The Bulldog, like the Hard Rock Café in Memphis and cities around
the world, has a gift shop that sells apparel and assorted souvenirs emblazoned
with its logo. While Betty waited outside, I braved the acrid smell from the
smoke pouring out the front door – it smelled
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like burning rope - to buy souvenir postcards to send to
fellow Mississippi State Bulldog fans back home. I was in and out in less than
3 minutes, otherwise I might have gotten “high” from breathing second-hand
marijuana smoke.
Coffeeshops like the Bulldog can sell up to five grams of marijuana per day to persons 18 years old and up. Here is what Rick Steves has to say about it:
“Locals buy marijuana by asking,
‘Can I see the cannabis menu?’ The menu looks like the inventory of a drug
bust. Display cases show various joints or baggies for sale. The Dutch include
a little tobacco in their prerolled joints. . .Coffeeshop owners have an
interest in keeping their trade safe and healthy. They warn Americans, unused
to the strength of the local stuff, to try a lighter leaf.”
As for prices, four marijuana joints (with or without
tobacco) sell for €12, nearly $5 each at current currency exchange rates,
according to Steves. Marijuana and hash are also available by the gram for
roll-your-own, or pipe-smoking varieties such as Black Widow, Amsterdam Whjte,
Thai Baby and Jungle.
A final comment on marijuana. No, we did not. Not then. Not
ever.
Like other European cities we’ve visited, Amsterdam seems to
have a pastry shop on every block. Betty sampled some at one of the La
Croissantiarie shops near the Bulldog Café. I drew a strange laugh from a clerk
when I asked her to tell me what a “boo-gee” is. Once she figured out that I
was really asking about what the Dutch call a “Brodjie (pronounced broh-jawh),”
she explained it is a sandwich. The word appears on menus and shop windows. It
describes just about anything edible the Dutch put between two slices of bread,
as in the Grinders of New England, the Po’Boys of Louisiana and the Subs of the
West Coast. Betty speculated that the word “boo-gee” must have an entirely
different context (perhaps sexual rather than food) because of the clerk’s
reaction to my inquiry.
Just off the Leidseplein square and a few blocks from the
Rijksmuseum is a celebrated colonnade that is as tall and long as a two-story
house. It honors Dutch chess champion Max Euweplein and serves as an entrance
to a courtyard that contains a large chessboard with two-foot high pieces. The
lintel of the colonnade, which looks like something out of ancient Rome, is
solemnly inscribed with the latin phrase, “Homo Sapiens non urinat in ventum.”
It seems that is the wording that appealed to Max’s sense of humor. It
translates into “Don’t pee into the wind.”
Nearby is a locally famous, former church that was converted into a music hall. Among the performers who played there – when it was decorated in psychedelic colors - in the 1960s were the Rolling Stones. Called Paradiso, it is still a venue for bands as well as a source of joints that are legally smoked during performances. Across the street is a large tulip bed decorated with lifesize, metal replicas of large iguanas basking on the grass and on the brick retaining walls.
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We paid €9 each to visit about 400 of the finest pieces in
the Rijksmuseum collection. The cavernous museum is undergoing a renovation |
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that will take several years to complete. The main building
is not as big as the Louvre in Paris or the V&A in London, but it is huge –
perhaps two square blocks.
A short walk from the Rijksmuseum is another well-visited
attraction, the Van Gogh Museum. It (admission is €10 for adults) houses about
200 paintings once owned by Vincent’s younger brother, Theo, a Paris art dealer
who largely supported Vincent during his short life. The Museum has the largest
collection of Van Gogh’s work in the world plus some of his personal
possessions such as letters. It also includes many of the lesser works of other
impressionist contemporaries including Gauguin, Manet, Monet and Pissaro.
Many of Van Gogh’s paintings on display were familiar to us.
Some were slightly different twists on familiar themes in much of his brushy
work, including sunflowers, wheatfields, seascapes and self-portraits (done for
practice to avoid paying model fees). There was a large group of animated
Italians going through the Museum. Most looked to be teenagers under the
watchful eye of their teachers. An advantage European students have over
Americans is that travel distances to important cultural and historic centers
are relatively short.
We walked back to the hotel through amazingly crowded
streets, jammed with trams, cyclists, walkers and a few cars. We saw a
policemen giving a young woman on a bicycle
a ticket, probably for failing to observe a traffic light. It took
perhaps 30 minutes to reach our hotel, conveniently located right in the middle
of the central city. In all, we probably walked 5 miles on this day.
It was nice to relax in our comfortable room and admire our
superb view of the Flower Market, the canals, the old clock tower at eye level
from our 5th floor room and the busy urban movement on the streets
beneath. On this chilly afternoon, we were treated to looking out the window
and seeing over the space of 40 minutes the full range of Amsterdam weather -
sunshine, sleet, rain, snow flurries then patches of blue sky. Like in other
European hotels we’ve stayed in, there are no ice machines in the Jolly
Carlton. Worse, there are no insulated ice buckets. Reluctant to pay tips for
repeated room service delivery of ice, I asked for (and got with a smile) a
plastic bag of ice at the bar just off the first-floor lobby. I quickly learned
that London Dry Gin is far superior to the vaunted Dutch Gin, at least to that
I tried.
Our bad experience with last night’s hotel pizza was still fresh in our mind. I was reluctant to pay €29 for the catch of the day, sole, at the hotel’s Caruso Restaurant. We asked a desk clerk for a seafood restaurant recommendation. He warned that seafood in Holland is expensive, which was surprising since the North Sea fishery is just outside the harbor. It turned out the seafood place the clerk suggested on Rembrandt Plein (Square) about three blocks away had changed hands. But the menu looked varied and reasonably priced so we dined at Ristorante Pinocchio. I had some very good blackened and grilled salmon. Betty thought her ravoli tasted like Chef Boyardee’s canned variety. But the huge salad and mountain of French fries we split were quite good. The ambience was charming and our Italian waiter, Ezra, who turned out to be a co-owner of the new restaurant spoke impeccable English and delivered excellent service.