Day 5: Amsterdam, City of Water, Brothels, and Fine Art

You are probably not aware that a normal Dutch breakfast always includes sprinkles. In fact, our hotel breakfast gave us the option of six different kinds, all in little boxes to spread on your bread: milk chocolate bits, milk chocolate shavings, dark chocolate bits, dark chocolate shavings, colorful bits, and smaller colorful bits. In order to keep with local customs, I ate a breakfast of kiwis and milk chocolate sprinkles on a baguette. And it was surprisingly lovely. :)

After breakfast we caught the tram into town and visited the famous Reijk Museum, home of many many Rembrandts (and a lot of stuff by other people, none of whom I recognized--not that I am an art connoisseur--but a few of whom I liked) including The Night Watch, which was gigantic and vaguely cute. My favorite part, though, was a small exhibition at the end about etchings. I thought they were beautiful and intricate and masterful and a lot more interesting than the paintings, in my opinion. There are some pictures of my favorites below. Also, an amazing doll house made in the 18th (?) century. (Again, sorry I can't put them throughout the post...basically the only drawback of mobile blogging.)

After that we went on a canal tour of the city, and we had a very nice captain who definitely had the humor of the Dutch - very dry and quiet, so it takes you a second to realize that it was a joke, but hilarious in a laugh-to-yourself-for-hours kind of way. We saw all the oldest parts of Amsterdam this way: many beautiful houses (including the narrowest one at 1 meter wide! Look for it in the pictures below!), the mayor's house, the oldest bridge, the smallest canal, the view of one of Monet's paintings, electric smart cars that you can rent hourly, and a lot a lot of adorable houseboats. We also went our to the bay and saw a recreation of a 17th century shipping vessel built voluntarily by unemployed people and a bunch of 100+ year old sailing ships, one of which our captain lived on and sailed. It was really surprisingly interesting.

Then we found Rembrandt's house, which he lived and worked in for fourteen years, and at one time was Holland's biggest art studio. They had refurnished it based on documents from his time to look just like how he had it (or pretty close, at least). The walls were covered in paintings and there was a room full of random artifacts - shells and swords and busts and African things. They had a demonstration of how he did his etchings and one on how he mixed his paint and set up his canvas. Still, I really loved the almost-complete collection of Rembrandt's etchings at the end. His portraits are especially beautiful, and some of my favorites are below.

Next we...well. Our destination was the Old Church, the oldest building in Amsterdam, built in the 1100s. But the problem was that the Old Church is right in the middle of the Red Light District. This should strike you as ironic - a gigantic, grand church marking the way to the brothels from the very edge of the city. Walking through it was very intimidating; every building was fronted with glass doors covered in curtains, which would occasionally be drawn back by women in various shades of barely-clothed making awkward eye contact with everyone who passed by. The square was full of about 75% male, most of them tourists coming to gawk. Most of the locals, male or female, just walked by, shaking their heads and smiling at the women. I felt weird - it's obviously such a man-oriented kind of place, not at all somewhere I ever want to be, but it was interesting to see. You know, in general I am a believer in an It's-your-life philosophy, i.e. you can do whatever you want to yourself as long as you don't affect people around you. If those women want to be prostitutes, fine, whatever, they have the right. They're not the part that bothered me, though I wonder why anyone would choose that life. But there's something creepy and vaguely sick about people coming and staring and pointing and laughing at these women who are displayed behind windows like merchandise. It's just...ugh. :-S

Oh well. It's all part of the experience, part of the city of Amsterdam. I'm glad I saw that side of it too, though thankfully not in too much detail. And maybe this isn't something that I was expecting to post about in my blog, but hey - if you want to travel vicariously with me through Europe, you're gonna get the bad right along with the good just like me. So deal with it. :)

Oh, and also, we went to the best freaking Italian food restaurant ever - Lo Stivales d'Or - where I ate olive bread with herbed garlic butter, cheesy endives, and the most perfect spaghetti carbonara ever. So yeah, if you're ever in Amsterdam... :)

Now, to Berlin!