Hello again, Blogonauts!

The Dutch are known worldwide for their contributions to the world of art. I am am a withering failure as art aficionado, but I enjoy learning about it. So I have devoted much of my Amsterdam trip to wandering through galleries with an English audio tour held to my ear.

On Saturday I visited the Rijksmuseum (pronounced "ryks-museum"), which is currently under a major renovation. They have transferred the most important works of the Dutch masters into an unmolested wing of the building. The paintings were exquisite, and I was there for hours, but unfortunately the kindly guard made me promise under threat of scorn and ridicule not to take any pictures of the pictures. Instead, you may view some of them on the museum's web site.

On Sunday I advanced time by a couple of centuries by visiting the Van Gogh Museum. The man sadly went mad, but holy sunflowers, was he ever prolific! Again photos were restricted, but it was wondrous to see the works in chronological order. His early works focused on dark browns (like "The Potato Eaters"), but then he moved to Paris and discovered the wonder of color (which showed up later in his depictions of Sunflowers). Both of these works hang in the Museum.

Then later on Sunday I allowed the temporal pendulum to swing back to the 1600s as I visited Rembrandt's house. Seeing the rooms where most of his paintings were crafted was certainly humbling.

Then on Sunday evening my ears had the chance to gain a little culture, too. I scored the very last available ticket for a concert at the Concertgebouw, one of the most acoustically-fine concert halls in the world. The sound in the hall lived up to its reputation. On stage was the Bach Choir and Orchestra of the Netherlands performing Bach's version of The St. Matthew Passion (Excellent performance overall, although one of the counter-tenor needed some Geritol to energize his voice so as to be heard over the oboes.)

There's more to come, as well. Tomorrow I'm taking a train to Haarlem to visit some museums there.

And of course there's even more show-and-tell regarding the rest of the trip, so watch this space.

Blog to you later!