Amsterdam 2

There’s an Amsterdam industry on the internet and I’ve neither wish nor ability to compete with it. There’s all the information you need there.The Internet Guide sums up the city rather neatly ‘Amsterdam is an unusual city in that it has all the advantages of a big city – culture, history, food, entertainment, good transport – with relatively few of the disadvantages : it is physically small, beautiful, relatively quiet, and largely thanks to the canals, has relatively little traffic.’

You need to choose your hotels carefully. Never go lower than three stars. (I once tried for one awful night a terrible two star hotel, the name of which I have happily forgotten). Seven Bridges in the Rembrandsplein area is delightful, with the largest breakfast ever, brought to your bedroom. Three museums which for me have always been a must. The famous Rijkswmuseum in Jan Luijkenstraat, with many 17th. century Dutch paintings including Rembrandt’s ‘Nightwatch’. Then there is the equally famous (and now greatly enlarged) Van Gogh Museum in Paulus Potterstraat, which is very commercial but if you love the painter as I do, inescapable. Thirdly the modern art museum, Stedelijk, which, during the present renovation, is housed temporarily near to the Central Station.

I love the Concertgebouw which is the home of the superb and internationally renowned orchestra named after it; a wonderful building and a perfect acoustic. And the modern Muziektheater with its wonderfully spacious auditorium and stage is a splendidly welcoming place for opera and ballet. I once heard Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin there in a gorgeous performance which happily wasn’t spoiled by the orchestral lights failing in the middle of Titania’s Letter song, which she resumed without losing her ardor, twenty minutes later! There are supposed to be a thousand restaurants in Amsterdam; many of them excellent and quite a few of them reasonably priced. Tips are included in the price; a brilliant idea.

…..this has made me very nostalgic!

Bryan

Amsterdam 1

I have visited this city several times, and for me it is a cultural mecca from which I have never tired. I know of no place to rival its music and art, and its opera and ballet; and then there are the canals, the tall solid buildings and some wonderful places to eat! I was last there twelve years ago and for this first of two postings for Amsterdam I am quoting from my diary of that time….

“Lewis Mumford says that Amsterdam is ‘capitalism’s one outstanding achievement, rivalled only by elegant Bath’. A long visit to the Historical Museum confirmed that. I have been there before but now there is an English text as well as the Dutch commentary which was very helpful. I was surprised that little is made of the engineering accomplishment of building a city on marshes, and digging out the three early canals, although there is reference to the fact that the great Town Hall of 1650 rests on 13,657 foundation piles. Despite the variety of trades and the number of consequent industries, grain seems to have been the basic wealth on which the city’s prosperity depended through the years. Its long resistance to Spanish Catholic domination and its position as the foremost international trading centre of Europe, may contribute to its reputation for religious tolerance.

The city was ruled, however, in its wealthiest years by a small clique of powerful families. There were riots in 1748, and the ‘Patriots’ rose and were put down by a Prussian army. But then with help from the French in 1795, the ruling families were deposed and a republic proclaimed by which time the population was 200,000. Now four times as many people live here.

The feel of the Exhibition is of a city satisfied with itself. The history peters out in the late 1800’s as if nothing happened after then, or nothing that alters the sense of continuity that makes this a city which caries its past with its present. The Museum is housed in what was once the Old City Orphanage which at one time was home for a thousand children, uniformed and segregated by their sex. In the last years of the eighteenth century about 30,000 paupers received weekly support in the form of a five cent coin, bread and butter and peat for their fire”.

..Certainly this Museum is a superb introduction to the city and deserves as long a visit as one can manage. (There is also an excellent restaurant nearby for when you have viewed as much as you wish). It is of course one of several galleries and museums in the city, and all of them beautifully presented, for, in Amsterdam, style and simple elegance is everywhere to be found. More next time.

Bryan