1st of September

Plan: to hit as many Amsterdam museums in one day as is humanly possible. Problem being, I don't exactly glide swiftly through art museums, there's too much friction involved, the friction between a piece of art and an art historian's brain. We managed to get through the Rijksmuseum mostly because it's undergoing major renovations right now so only The Masterpieces were on display.  Given the size of the rest of the building, I feel that the museum as a whole when it's finished will be comparable to the Louvre, it's that huge.  Even then I was failing fast, fighting both sore feet and a tired body. Turns out, I lean predominantly on my heels and I've already done so for too long in one my sets of shoes, which I really need to remember.

Anyway, it wasn't so bad afterwards, and we stopped at the museum campus' restaurant for food and coffee before heading to the next museum on the list: The van Gogh Museum.  It was really well done, obviously they don't have most of his very famous ones, but what they did have covered his entire oeuvre pretty thoroughly, and it was nice to see some undiscovered gems. I never knew he could paint flowering trees so deftly, for example.  I managed to survive through the van Gogh exhibit, but was felled by the two extra stories of Odilon Redon, the Frenchman with the best name, and Emile Bernard, which was especially nice as I'm quite fond of Redon's work. I ending up skipping the floor of prints, though since most of what I enjoy about Redon is his use of color, I probably didn't miss much.  After all this artsy sensory overload, it was convenient to be able to hop a tram and return to the hostel for a nap, cause I desperately needed it.

At 5, after a good 2 hours of regaining strength, we went back to the train station for some 5-day tram passes, some euros for me, and to get some dinner at the grocery store there, which has a name which sounds like the american chain Albertson's but without any relation.  From there, we hopped on a tram, incidentally to the same area of the city that we were in earlier for the museums,  headed for a giant park.  The sandwiches were quite tasty, and we had some orange-kiwi juice that we both agreed was tasty, but extremely tart. The Dutch word for orange, like most Dutch words for fruits and vegetables, called it a special type of apple, a sinaasappel. (maybe it was mandarin oranges??) For comparison, the Dutch word for potato is aardappel, 'ground apple'.  I don't get it either.  Scott surmises it has something to do with the history of orchards here.

At any rate, when we'd finished everything but the leftover bread and the huge Toblerone we got (we got licorice too, but we devoured it) I got out my sketching material, planning on the time for both ink and watercolor, since Scott was taking a walk, but for whatever reason I kept getting approached on the basis of my artwork.  Seriously, it was really weird.  The first guy wanted me to make a drawing of Spinoza for him, for his little paperbound book (I seem to recall catching that it was originally a yearbook or something) of photos of people taken in front of the statue and his own child-like drawings. It was really peculiar.   He assured me he would provide the paper, and would reimburse me for my time with some kind of Amsterdam tourist thing which I never fully caught the name of but since he said something like 'that they're always giving out' I suspected that it wasn't anything too unique.  I apologized that I was on a limited amount of time, and wanted to be able to finish my own drawing first, so I couldn't help him out, and so after a bit he left on his bike again.

Sadly, soon after Spinoza guy left, another art lover arrived, wanting to show me his portfolio.  Having never heard this one before, I was vague for a while to see if he'd  go away of his own accord, but he pulled out his cardboard portfolio binder instead.  Oh, well, so much for drawing the Filmmuseum.  His stuff was all portraits, and he gave me a scanned copy of one "my kung fu master" he called it.  (Scott: maybe it WAS actually his kung fu master; maybe he knew kung fu!)  Anyway, Scott soon arrived, back from his walk, and I assumed this meant that the guy would leave and I'd get to get back to drawing, but no, they introduced themselves and Otto, as his name turned out to be, started in with the stories.  Stories about how he lost his two front teeth (a mugging in California), when he lived in Acapulco (lotsa beaches), how he bought and lost a classic car in Mexico City, how Finnish drivers are insane, and how tomorrow he was going to go get his passport, since traveling was his only necessity. (He also needed the remainder of our sandwich bread and 2€.)  I suppose if I had to miss drawing it could at least be for some pretty wild stories, and it kept Scott entertained, which I always fear is not happening when I'm engrossed in sketching, heh.

31st of August

Perhaps taking a transatlantic flight that arrived at 8 in the morning was not the smartest decision we'd ever made. The flight itself was quite nice, Coach was underbooked, so Scott and I had the whole row to ourselves, which we attempted to utilize for napping as much as we could, though that proved to be as futile as sleeping on airplanes usually is. Not that the flight was boring or tedious, since Continental saw fit to provide us with a staggering variety of entertainment options, including board games that you could play with other passengers (Scott trounced me at backgammon) and 300some movies of every variety. Scott watched some zany Chinese film and I watched The Italian Job, the original one. So, while we weren't bored while failing to sleep, it hardly mattered by the time we arrived at Amsterdam Schipol, 1am our time. We caught the train to the city center easily enough, and made it to the hostel without much delay, only to find that the cleaning crew wouldn't be done until 2pm. Reasonable, butunfortuate. Resiliant, we dumped our bags in the luggage room and ate breakfast there, then went out in search of coffee. Getting european espresso again was heavenly! We decided that despite coffee and breakfast, actually visiting a museum or site was probably going to require too much from our addled senses, so we walked about the city instead. Found a perfect place to sketch and took the opportunity, too. I plan to ink the pencil and then return to the spot and watercolor it.

After a while though, the double espresso was bound to wear off, and it didn't gradually either. No, all of a sudden, while visiting an english language bookstore, the familiar loathesome all-nighter headache set in. It was only 1-ish, but we made our way back to the hostel, me clutching my head, Scott insuring I didn't stumble into anyone. At the hostel we got water and food while we waited for our room to be ready, so we could end this sleeplessness once and for all. When 2 finally rolled around, we dashed upstairs only to find that maybe the room wasn't actually clean yet. We asked, and were assured that they were done and we were fine, but soon after, another couple of cleaners came by to apoligize that no, it wasn't clean yet. So by 3 we finally closed the room-darkening curtains and passed out with an alarm set to wake us by 5. Not only do you get whatever alarms you set, but you also get the belltower ringing the time. It's got a great ring, I'm going to try to get a video of it, cause it's lovely. Regardless, we went out for dinner, Thai, and then spent quite a lot of time wandering around the city. There's not really much else to do after 5pm, when all the museums and churches are closed. Ideally I should turn that into prime sketching time- the sun doesn't set until 7:30-ish...