After breakfast we donned our 'orange stuff' and wandered down the road to the huge Vondelpark, 47 hectares, which was only about 15 minutes slow walk from our apartment. There was orange everywhere although we were a bit surprised that not everyone was wearing orange. We had expected that most people would have been wearing orange from what we'd read and heard. There was certainly heaps of orange things in the shops everywhere.
The park was full, very crowded. People selling second hand junk, lined each side of all the paths, along with people selling all sorts of food, playing music, doing tricks, and games. People also set up stalls along the footpaths between the building frontages and the bicycle lane which made walking along the footpaths a risky business.
It was a lot of fun and the crowd got more and more dense as the day went on which eventually caused us to leave the park and go and find somewhere to have a very late lunch.
Some photos of our Koningsdag
posers
orange cakes and tulips
in the park
I had a go at knocking down the monsters
Here's the monsters and the kids who ran the 'knock down the monster' game
making music
and Barry spotted this
By this time the two carousers of the previous night were feeling very jaded so back to the apartment we went. Barry and Sam had a sleep, Sam because he was a bit under the weather and Barry because he had a nasty cold and was feeling rotten. Emma and I held the fort and kept the robbers out.
Eventually, the sleepers woke up and it was time to mooch off to the pub 5 minutes down the road for dinner. There was a big crowd of people, most of them dressed in orange, all outside drinking and hardly anyone inside eating which suited us fine. It was an ok pub dinner, much like we could have in NZ - we were having a lot of difficulty finding places which served traditional dutch food. Amsterdam is like Auckland in that respect - there are plenty of restaurants here doing all sorts of different food - a lot of pizza places, hamburgers, Chinese, Thai, Indian, steak houses, Irish pubs are everywhere, pasta places one after the other. In desperation I had a look on line and found out about a restaurant called Moeders, means Mothers in English, which does traditional Dutch food so Sam booked us in there for our last night in Amsterdam.
The next day, our final full day together in Amsterdam was spent going to the Van Gogh museum and then to the Rijksmuseum. We had booked tickets online for 9 am at the Van Gogh because they let people into the museum in batches, the Rijksmuseum tickets, bought when we got tickets to the tulip farm, had no specified time. The two museums are next door to each other and only a short tram ride from the apartment, which was extremely helpful in us getting to the Van Gogh by 9am. None of us had got much sleep the night before because people celebrated Konnigsdag all night and the sound come up from the street, in the door and through the walls from the next door apartment and through the ceiling from the apartment above us grrrrrrrrrr
Not conducive to happy museum visiting but, I'm happy to say, we did very well at bothof them. They are both amazing and well worth visiting and altogether we spent about 6 hours museuming and finally left because the lack of sleep was taking its toll and we were hungry, as we hadn't had much breakfast and were yet to have lunch.
Going to the Van Gogh at 9 am was a good decision because we were in the 1st batch to enter so there weren't many people which meant that we could stand back and look at the paintings from a distance as well as up close without people getting in the way. There were crowds of people by the time we left. We all had a laugh at his early paintings because they were so bad, eg, in one painting
one side of a woman's face was completely different than the other side. I looked at it for ages wondering if I was seeing it correctly. There is also a lot of information and displays of things such as using a 'perspective frame' - I'd never heard of such a thing let alone know how it works, and Van Gogh's use of colour theory and the colour wheel. I know about these things and found it hugely interesting. Also, they had microscopes set up so people could see how colours were put together using different brush techniques. I think I'm explaining this quite badly so I'm going to stop.
In the Rijksmuseum I was stunned by the gigantic painting 'The Battle of Waterloo', and by the huge number of people in front The Night Watchman' and also taken aback by the hordes of people taking photos. Sometimes it looked like some people were simply photographing everything as in - snap and move on, snap and move on, snap and move on. By contrast, the Van Gogh Museum has banned taking photos and good on them, we said. I've heard many times that the flash from cameras has a detrimental effect and have also seen many times people simply ignoring signs asking for flashes not to be used.
There is such a lot to see in the Rijksmuseum and there was quite a lot that I didn't see but I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and would happily go back again. The four of us enjoyed both museums and agreed that it had been time well spent.
on the way to the museums
the Rijksmuseum
this is part of the museum library. The green stripes along the top of the shelves act like dust-covers to keep the dust of the top of the books as they sit on the shelves. This was the only photo I took inside the museum.
some lovely real estate that we saw on our walk home
That night we went to Moeders for our traditional Dutch food dinner. Happily for us it was a 10 minute walk down the road from the apartment and lucky for us that Sam had booked because it was packed and we had to wait for about 15 minutes for a table to be vacated. The host was very apologetic and have us each a complimentary glass of wine to drink while we waited. Without the booking we would not have eaten there.
The idea behind Moeders is that it is a tribute to Dutch mothers and their cooking. The walls are covered with framed photos of patrons' mothers and the blurb on the menu says that they're still putting up photos if people want to give them a framed photo of their mother and it also says that when the restaurant opened the owners asked their friends to donate plates to the restaurant which is why there isn't matching crockery.
We had a very fine dinner but I can't remember what we ate and I didn't write it down except I do remember that there was sour cabbage and pickled red cabbage which was delicious, boiled potatoes and I had some kind of stew but don't remember the names of any of the dishes. We were very happy with our dinner and very happy to have eaten traditional Dutch food at last.
inside Moeders
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