amsterdam antics
Saturday, June 13th, 2009by a Mama, whose knee will not get better – still swollen and wound filled with pus
Amsterdam, Holland
THE MORNING: driving to Amsterdam
flat flat flat
windmills windmills windmills
funny road signs
crossing the Afsluitdijk, made all the more interesting by having read this article
NOON: arriving in Amsterdam
It’s probably best that Grandpa tells the story about not getting under the bridge in one piece <wink>
I’m still kicking myself for simply saying I thought the other van wouldn’t fit with the bikes on the roof (the bridge being 2.9m high, and the van being 2.75 without bikes)….and not being stroppy about it, insisting that we stop and check before proceeding, figuring Rob knew better than me as he was the one who had put the bikes up there……but it turns out he didn’t actually hear me and must have been answering something else he thought I had said……anyway, we arrived with a bang! And a bike snapped in half (among other sundry issues like ripping off part of the roof rack and loosening the handlebars of another bike….) We’re thinking of adding an accident log to our blog!
THE AFTERNOON: first explore of Amsterdam
After a series of nights costing between zero and eight euros per van, we knew Amsterdam was not going to be cheap. 15 euros our website said. Our website was wrong. Double that for one van and nearly triple it for the other. No longer would we plan on staying three days, but we’d see what we could fit in to 24 hours.
Loading up the bikes that still worked, we hit the streets. The campsite was supposedly 3km from the centre, but maybe that is as the crow flies. Good thing we’re used to walking because we covered 10km before catching a tram home (of course, the cyclists pedalled back), and we had not made it in to the very centre.
We had, however, seen quintessential canals and facaded houses and bicycles and jazz-playing musicians and people sitting in cafes and Rembrandt (well, his statue).
We had also visited a museum we had read about when we were in Estonia. The Biblical Museum. It is housed in a building built in 1660. For some reason totally unrelated to Biblical themes, the two kitchens have been left exactly as they were way back then. It is quite something to step on flagstone floors laid 350 years ago, wondering who has been there before you!
But while the huge marble sink and double oven complete with whole pig and a week’s worth of bread were of interest, the main attraction was the Bible stuff.
In the early 1600s, a theologian and minister, Leendert Schouten, began his life work of bringing the Old Testament alive for ordinary lay people. He collected an inspiring assortment of Egyptian artefacts to illustrate the time the Israelites were in slavery there – mummy wrappings, a sarcophagus, a real dead mummy, a brick most probably made by the slaves, paintings, statues. We have read extensively about Ancient Egypt, but his small collection added richness to our studies, and elicited a, “Ah I never knew they were so big” and “Look you can see the straw” about the brick.
In addition to his Egypt collection, Schouten created a scale model of the tabernacle…..even before he had completed it, thousands of people had visited to have a look, and, according to the records, were highly impressed by it. Having read this, I was expecting a magnificent masterpiece. Actually, I found it to be a bit disappointing – it was just like an oversized dolls’ house! Sure, it was interesting, and the ten minute movie that now runs with it was informative, but it lacked the WOW factor I was anticipating.
Solomon’s Temple didn’t though. Someone else had made that, also back in the 1600s, and gifted it to the museum, and standing over a metre tall, I found it to be more impressive (they didn’t have Lego back then and so people must have spent their spare time working with wood!)
There was also a more recent model of a worship place for Christian, Jews and Muslims, and an interesting display linking the history of these three groups.
There were amazing paintings…on walls and on ceilings, some copies, some originals.
There was an impressive collection of old Dutch Bibles, and statues of our “friends” Erasmus and Luther standing side by side. But this was not just a museum for looking at things. It was well-geared to the little set, who enjoy *doing*….where there were models placed above ground level to look at, there were steps to climb up for easy viewing, and there were all sorts of interactive displays as well…..there were “binoculars” to look through, there were books to be pulled off a shelf and when opened they turned out to be boxes containing a special piece of realia and the accompanying story (Joseph’s multi-coloured coat, for example), there were letters to be coloured like the illuminated letters in the old Bibles, there were rubbings to be made from brass pictures, there were computers with various displays, there was a very interesting-looking Greek-Dutch letter wheel, which we could not make head nor tail of, there were marble containers filled with scents and an accompanying Scripture (almond, rose, myrrh, olive oil, bitter herbs, acacia etc). There was even a garden with an assortment of plants from the Bible, again, each with a plaque giving a Scripture and description.
All in all, it served it’s purpose of being INSPIRATIONAL very well. The only complaint was that we did not have enough time to look at absolutely everything and read all the descriptions by each object. That’s high praise!
Time on the road in the vans: ?a couple of hours?
Distance covered in the vans: ??km
Distance walked by some: 10km
Distance biked by others: 16km
rayres