Plans to view the Romanovs and Revolution exhibit at the Hermitage in
Amsterdam are cheerfully upended by actual sun in the sky and KT whisks us on
an even better tour. As we depart her
sunny and beautiful flat overlooking the Amstel, KT hands us a picture of a
bewigged and superior-looking 17th c. gent.
We are on a mission! Turns out
that she lives almost next door to the former home of Conraed van Beuningen,
the mad mayor of Amsterdam. CvB was an intellectual,
an experienced diplomat, well-connected, and probably because of all these
things, also filthy rich. The money was
likely from both inheritance and his position as a director of the Dutch East
India Company in the mid 1600s, which as you know by now was a pretty damn good
time to be a director of the Dutch East India Company. And, he was a six-time mayor of Amsterdam, so
clearly someone liked him. But he also
had a bit of the bi-polar, and that’s a challenge. After he lost all his money, things went
downhill, and during one fit of madness, CvB wrote Kabbalistic signs and
messages on the outside of his house, in
his own blood. You can still see
them! There are pentacles and ships and
almost illegible writing. CvB died
penniless except for some furniture and a painting by some Dutch guy named
Rembrandt, which is reportedly still in the house.
The blood bit may be apocryphal (there are skeptics among our party) but
who cares, it makes for a great story.
Lightness prevails in our day after that gruesome tale, and we make a
stop to visit the elegant Willet-Holthuysen House, see the Tuschinsky Theater,
tram it to Centraal and then take a ferry across the IJ (pronounced eye) river,
which is really more just a passage way to the North Sea than an actual
river. A brief visit to the bustling
Eyefilmmuseum results in souvenir flipbooks for all. It is a whirlwind day made more so by this
crazy wind. We are sorry to say tot
ziens[1] to the Funcles
today but are somewhat soothed by a large platter of extremely tasty frites at
dinner.
Fortunately, I looked at the Anne Frank tix tonight and discovered
that it is tomorrow at 10 am. Scheduling
disaster averted.
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