In episode 6 of season 3 of the brilliant football-based drama Ted Lasso [spoiler alert], a main character, Rebecca, is knocked off a bridge in Amsterdam by a cyclist and plunges into the murky waters of the canal below. Watching it, I thought it was a bit unrealistic, contrived for the sake of the plotline that followed.
That was until I went to Amsterdam. The bike is king here, the cycleways swarm with them. They are ridden with the speed, numbers, and ruthlessness, of a Tour de France peloton. Add to the mix that for those of us from keep-left countries, the danger is always coming from the wrong direction. And there is danger aplenty. Last year around 1,500 people were injured in bike accidents in Amsterdam. Thankfully, we avoided contributing to the 2023 tally.
The main reason for visiting Amsterdam was art. We have seen a lot of Van Goghs over the years, from travelling exhibitions to NZ and Oz, to collections in the Louvre and the South of France. But the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam was always the Mother Lode.
The Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, bringing together the largest collection of the master ever assembled, was a different story. I only found out about it after booking Amsterdam. It had sold out like a rock concert months before. Thankfully, through a mixture of luck and fiendish cunning I managed to snare two tickets from a short additional release window for a night-showing that snapped shut so quickly I almost lost a fingernail.
Vermeer was a master of light, often placing his subjects in front of windows, bathing them in soft light, creating a pearlescence and luminosity that defies the medium.
We spent an enjoyable hour browsing the Seventeenth-Century masterpieces before stepping out into the balmy night. We found a café overlooking a nearby canal for a beer and roast vege salad, and got chatting to a nice couple at the next table. From Tampa, Florida, they were on a business trip and worried about what state they might be in for a presentation they had to make the next morning.
Having already had enough to drink they ordered what they thought was one last glass of wine, only to be delivered an entire bottle. Ever willing to aid fellow travellers in difficulty, we helped them dispose of the excess.
The following morning we had an amazing visit to the Van Gogh Museum (deserving of its own post – to follow) and a return to the Rijksmuseum to mop up the exhibits not accessible during the Vermeer visit. This took us through a massive collection of artworks in a magnificently ornate building. Again, there is too much to cover in any detail, but highlights included the exquisite still-lifes for which the Dutch masters are famous, the epic Battle of Waterloo, by Jan Willem Pieneman, and the ongoing restoration of The Night Watch by Rembrandt, complete with its working platform and noise frequency testing equipment, all on display within a huge glass enclosure, like the defendant in a British murder trial.
Another highlight was spotting a 17th century time traveller with his smartphone in Thomas de Keyser’s unimaginably named ‘Group Portrait of an Unidentified Board of Governors’, ca 1625 (see pic). He even has the same type of iPhone case as me.
We rounded off the day with a leisurely 1-hour cruise along the canals. Amsterdam got a big tick as a friendly, vibrant, cultural and seemingly safe city. I would only mark it down for its totally farcical arrivals process. I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say the (slightly edited) sign in the arrivals hall in the pic below sums up their attitude.
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