Going Dutch

The last two weeks I have been traveling in the Netherlands, for the first time. I stayed in Amsterdam and visited several places about an hour by train. A few places I went to:

1. Amsterdam: Lots of canals, as is well known. I went to the Anne Frank house (turned out to have the same street number as my dorm room in college), the Hotel Pulitzer with a grand piano hanging from the ceiling above the entrance, the van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum [which had exhibitions on armoury including a six foot long rifle; Rembrandt's Nightwatch undergoing restoration; a bunch of Vermeers and Ruisdaels; and the biggest diamond (the Banjarmasin) that I have seen in my life].

   
   

   In the vicinity was the MOCO (Museum of Contemporary Art) with modernists like Keith Haring and the street artist Banksy, whose imaginative work I enjoyed quite a bit. Close by is the beautiful Vondelpark, a fine place to take a post-lunch walk. Finally, I went to the Rembrandthuis (house of Rembrandt). The original kitchen, bedroom, studio, it's all there.

   
   

   As impressive as the paintings were the copper etchings; no one could paint human eyes like Rembrandt, the light in them almost unearthly, the crinkles around them showing age and character. There is a special term used to describe the type of portraits he made: they are called 'tronies'. Tronie is Dutch for face. A tronie painting aims at revealing an exaggerated mood, rather than achieving a likeness of the sitter, who was often anonymous.

   
   

2. Leiden: A small town with a famous university. The Nobel prizes for superconductivity (Kammerlingh Onnes) and magnetism (Zeeman and Lorentz) have placards associated with them outside the physics department. I also learned the only siblings (talk about sibling rivalry) to ever win the Nobel were from Leiden U - Jan (Economics 1969) and Nikolaas (Physiology/Medicine 1973) Tinbergen. I will mention something more about the university in my next post.

   
   

   Opposite the physics department is the Wereldmuseum (the National Museum of Ethnology) where my mother got a masters degree back in 1964. Compact collection of Chinese, Indian, African, Latin American and Middle Eastern art. The most interesting exhibit was focused on the peoples of the Arctic; second prize goes to an extensive display on K-pop.

   
   

3. Rotterdam: The attractions include the Erasmus bridge, which one crosses to see the Hotel New York, which served as a boarding house for immigrants to the US who sailed the Holland-America line, specifically the SS Rotterdam (now permanently moored in the harbor) to Ellis Island. The most famous passenger to take this route: Albert Einstein.

   
   

   There's a Museum of Immigration near the pier which gives a lot of background to those voyages. A nice eating place downtown: the artistically done Markthal, which in turn is close to the famous cube housing. The Euromast tower provides a panoramic view of the whole city, somewhat derailed by fog when I visited.

   
   

4. Den Haag: The seat of the government. The Mauritshuis has some very fine Dutch paintings (in particular the Vermeers are outstanding - including, but not limited to, the Girl with a Pearl Earring, another tronie, and sometimes called the Dutch Mona Lisa ).

   
   

   There is a museum celebrating the famous graphic artist Escher, beloved of physicists and mathematicians - got to see his handwritten journal, and learn that his half-brother was a professor of crystallography (relevant to Escher's famous work on tiling).

   
   

   A very entertaining visit was to Madurodam, a miniaturized model city, representing the main architecture from various cities (Erasmus Bridge, the Dom Tower, the Markthal, Schiphol airport, canals with automated boats, roads with automated traffic, rail tracks with automated trains), industries (shipping, windmills), etc. Check out the famous Sand Castle building.

5. Utrecht: The museum Speelklok: A very impressive collection of musical machines - street organs, dance machines (some of them as big as a house), musical time pieces, self-playing pianos; everything that came shortly before Edison's phonograph (which rendered them obsolete). Some of the machines looked like the early computers, with the melodies encoded on metal discs or cylinders or punched hole paper cards.

   
   

   Other attractions; the Dom Tower (the highest tower in the Netherlands); the Scheveningen beach on the North Sea; the Kunstmuseum, with a lot of information on the Titanic, including part of a scale model.

   
   

6. Haarlem: The Frans Haals Museum has a fine collection of paintings. The Teylers Museum (the oldest in the Netherlands) has an extensive (with ~18,000 exhibits) and outstanding collection of historical scientific instruments - electroscopes, microscopes, telescopes, magnets, vacuum apparatus, electrostatic generators (as big as a room - one can only imagine the sparks generated), and many more. Lorentz apparently had a lab here, which Einstein visited.

   
   

   Afterword: Visiting the Netherlands in the winter has its pros and cons: the temperatures can be quite low (~30F), but the touristic rush is much less (especially in the museums). A warning: beware of the bicyclists when you walk around, they come at you from every direction. The Dutch are friendly and direct; almost everybody speaks English. Other places to visit on a later trip: Delft, Eindhoven, and Maastricht.