This being a largely Protestant country, Easter does not getting as huge
billing as it does in say, Rome, or New Orleans.[1] Also, it is cold and raining so like apparently
everyone else in A-dam we head to museums on Easter Sunday. First stop:
Banksy/Dalì at the MOCO which is kind of cool but of course Banksy is
really about sticking it to the art establishment so it is a bit weird to see his
work enshrined in a museum. And the Dalì
piece feels a bit tacked on. The
connection is: they are both artists who
use/d the artistic mainstream deliberately for their own ends. But while Banksy has a lot to say about the
world, Dalí is rather harder to parse. As
we’re trying to figure it out, a young museum staffer comes through with a
spray bottle, freshening the air. If you
really like that scent, you can buy it at the gift shop.
One member of our party is not at all happy about museums generally
but she rather rallies with a cool Banksy hat.
Pancake-fueled (how all tourists run here), we make our way to the
mobbed and freezing Dam Square thinking to visit the Nieuwe Kerk but it doesn’t
excite (exhibit on press photography but another member of our party thinks
that would be a busman’s holiday) so we fall into danger of aimless wandering
in the cold until we spot the Begijnhof on the google map.
Have I mentioned that it is cold and rainy here? Because it is not so pleasant for
wandering.
Anyhoo, the Begijnhof is a charming oasis tucked back in the behind
of some crowded tourist streets. It was created
as a cloister of sorts that may have been built as early as the late 14th c.,
for some Catholic women who were very pious but didn’t want to go so far as to
take the vows and live with the other nuns. This was apparently not uncommon – it was
called beguinage – and we determine that these were the cool nuns. So they built themselves a little square of
classically Dutch houses – tall and narrow and mostly brick now although there
is one original wooden one left (the oldest wooden house in all of A-dam, 16th
c.!), with large windows, all cheek by jowl because that is how urban Dutch houses
go. Once the Prots took over (during the
politely named “Alteration” of 1578, when the Prot business men kicked out the
Catholics), they were allowed to stay because their property was not owned by
the Church, but by the ladies themselves.
Their chapel was given over to an English sect, however. The gals, preferring anything to that, built
a “secret” chapel inside of two houses next to each other. The “” are because it is actually pretty big,
and has a three-story atrium inside so while it may have looked like another
prosperous house from the outside, it sure was not a secret within.
The great thing about the Begijnhof now is that to this day, only
women can live there. I suppose that
they must be women of good faith, perhaps lay sisters or some such. It might be a little bit like living in
University Hall, with tourists constantly circling, but it offers the illusion,
at any rate, of peace and serenity within this small and crowded city.
The Amsterdam Museum offers a warm, dry, and, oh, also informative
break from the elements. We learn a lot
about shipping, of course, and enough to be better informed about the rise of
secular rule (which is really just Protestant but you don’t need an advanced
degree to figure out that getting rid of the Catholics would be entirely to the
fiscal benefit of the businessmen who ended up running things for the next few
centuries) and the coming of the French (goodbye self-rule for a while but in
the end #nothankyou Napoleon, see ya at Waterloo!), and the decimation of the
Jewish population during WW2, and gay marriage (first in the world! They are very proud of that one). Only Laurent and Peter and I make it all the
way back into some rooms that aren’t well-advertised but which we think are the
most interesting of the place: the
bookkeeper’s office and boardroom of the orphanage that was the original use of
these buildings. They are left largely
as they were during the height of their use:
wood paneled, with great portraits of groups of respectable-looking
burghers with small urchins, whose lives are about to be saved, about the
tables. It is very quiet back there, and
while it surely wouldn’t have been in the 1700s, you can get just a whiff of
the earnest, self-satisfied, and pious wealth that drove this city through
centuries of prosperity.[2]
Dinner tonight is at de Struisvogel (The Ostrich), highly recommended
by more than one Chowhound and Hungry Onion source, where you can, in fact, eat
Struisvogel and it is, in fact, delicious.
After dinner, Andy and Laurent finally pay off their longstanding
debt to Izzy with a roaring game of charades.
This culminated with my effort to do a charade of Hamilton, that somehow
made my playing companions shout “Swine-y Todd!”
[1] But they do have Easter trees,
like in Germany! This is a perfectly
charming tradition where you bring in some branches, and hang little Easter
ornaments like bunnies and birdies and eggs on them.
[2]
Here’s the thing about Dutch history. It
is long, and quite remarkable for such a small plot of land, mostly reclaimed
form the sea. As in much of Europe,
there were Romans (maybe some Vikings, too), then Spanish, then they ruled
themselves and kind of got together with England – that was an
enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend kind of situation). The French showed up, as they did in a lot of
Europe in the early 19th c., but that was short-lived. Belgium carved itself off in the mid-19th
c. Somehow they remained neutral during
WW1, and you’ll hear more about WW2 later in our trip. What I find interesting is that many say that
their big moment was about 50 years in the 17th c., and that it has
been all downhill since then. Sure
doesn’t appear that way, tho. This
remained a prosperous nation, a center of business and commerce, great producer
of art, with large colonial holdings, until the 20th c., and
everyone still seems awfully happy to be here.
Maybe downhill is all relative in the Netherlands.
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