Day 4 – Wednesday – Museums – Van Gogh & Dutch Resistance

Two museums, and 6 hours on our feet today has made for a rather tiring but very interesting day.

First up was the Van Gogh Museum, and our once again, pre-ordered tickets, which got us past another big queue.  Vincent Van Gogh has always been an interesting character – didn’t start painting until he was 27, dead at 37, never sold a painting in his life time, supported by his brother throughout his artistic career, and increasingly unhinged during the latter part of his life.  The Museum, having many of his original paintings focuses a lot on his technical development as a painter, influences of Japanese art, and peer artists on his work, his relationship with his Brother, Theo, the various phases of his development in the different places where he lived and worked. 

I took lots of photos of the paintings that we liked the most, and you can see them on the blog.  What the Museum didn’t cover was how the world discovered Vincent Van Gogh after he died.  I had always assumed that his brother Theo (who was a well know art dealer) had “got him out there”, but then he died 6 months after Vincent from Syphilis.  It turns out that Vincent was getting very concerned about his financial prospects, as Theo was having financial difficulties, and now had a wife and a new baby (hard to reconcile with the death by syphilis) , and was struggling to be able to support Vincent at that time.  This has been mooted as a possible reason for his suicide.  Anyway, with both Vincent and Theo gone, it was down to Theo’s wife Johanna who was then responsible for elevating the worth and genius of Vincent to the levels we see today.

After the VVG Museum, we did an hour’s walk to the other side of Central Amsterdam to visit the Amsterdam Resistance Museum.  The museum is arranged around a central pathway, that takes you through what life was like under German occupation, how the Germans started off as benevolent occupiers, and rapidly transformed into aggressive oppressors.  Branching off from this central pathway is side tracks that talk through the types of resistance that people were involved in, whether that was disobedience, publishing anti-German newspapers, going into hiding, hiding people – Jews, student protesters, striking workers – the list seemed to expand as the war went on.  Some of these sound quite minor things, but as the war went on, the consequences for any of them started to be the same – shipped off to a concentration camp, or execution.

I’ve mentioned before that bikes are everywhere in Amsterdam, but there’s so much more to them than that.  They cover every social strata, from the young, hip and cool, to the business executive, to the elderly, labourers, office workers, everybody is on a bike.  There are lots of cycle lanes, but for us, as well as the cycle lanes, the tram lines, a never ending stream of traffic islands, and the fact that the traffic is on the wrong side of the road, it’s all quite confusing and we really have to have our wits about us whenever we’re trying to negotiate our way across the roads. 

Helmets aren’t required in Amsterdam, on either bicycles or scooters, and virtually nobody wears them.  The bikes are the sit up and beg type, so you have good visibility, and generally the riders aren’t going very fast, so it doesn’t seem to be any problem. 

Cycling seems to be the thing you do, when you’re doing something else – finding something in your pocket, holding an umbrella, talking on your phone, texting (of course).  The cyclists seem to have some sort of 6^th sense about the traffic.  As someone who does a bit of cycling and makes my way nervously through any heavy traffic area, I am amazed at how well the whole traffic thing works in Amsterdam.  Everybody just seems to make room for everybody else and it works in a way that you couldn’t write a set of rules to hold it all together.  I have read on the internet that “Local Amsterdam bikers tend to ignore red lights. They tote friends on the backs of their bikes. They ride on the sidewalks. They zip past fellow bikers without warning. They don't use lights at night (which is required by law). They chat on phones while weaving through crowds. They're not to be mimicked!”, so maybe it is viewed rather dimly in some circles, but I have to say that I’m gobsmacked at how well it works and how competent everybody is on a bike.

Tomorrow we pick up the car, and head to Brugge, so on to the next part of the journey.