Velda and Joe: A(nother) Grand Adventure

We arrived at the Park Plaza near the airport on Saturday afternoon. Returning the car to Hertz was remarkably easy, and all I needed next was a nap in our hotel room. Nap turned into sleep, which led to us both awake at 6 wondering about dinner. The nearest local restaurant, Q Beach, was about a kilometer away, on the canal. We took the walk.

It was quite a place. There is a large outside patio with wooden picnic tables and sandboxes with beach toys (shovels, pails, earthmoving trucks), as well as inside seating in the noisy front room (live music) and the less noisy area around back. We chose that area. Since this is a holiday weekend there were a lot of people dressed in orange and having a very happy time. All ages were present, from toddlers to people in our cohort. Smiles all around.

After returning to the hotel we processed photos, wrote journal entries, and then collapsed. The collapse didn’t do me any good, as I only got about four hours of sleep. We got up at 6 to get ready to catch the tram into Amsterdam. Things delayed us, and we left at the last minute (9am) to catch the No. 1 at Matterhorn station, which would drop us off at the Rijksmusem in time for our 10am tickets.

Our agenda was to do the Rijksmuseum, then the FOAM museum of photography, then the Marseille Huis museum of photography, then maybe the Rembrandt Center, before going to either the center of Amsterdam (De Dam) or one of the gardens. It was a nice idea. At the Rijksmuseum we sprung into action and visited the giftshop. There were some lovely cards of flowers, and Velda had the giddiness I used to get going into Fry’s computer store. Afterwards we went into the temporary exhibit Metamorphoses, artwork inspired by Ovid’s poem The Metamorphoses. Now I need to read it. The English language guide on the app is narrated by Stephen Fry, and in addition to all of the beautiful old and multimedia work there was an astonishing three-screen projection of a woman’s face surrounded by snakes. She is very calm, inward looking, occasionally blinking, and the snakes move around and over her. It is inspired by the Medusa myth, and is called “Spawn” by Juul Kraijer. It was created in 2019, so it’s not AI.

Following that exhibit we got lunch at the Cafe, which was as good as I remembered from 2018. And then we decided to separate for 90 minutes. Velda would go to the flowers, and I would do whatever caught my fancy. What caught my fancy was doing multiple exposures of scenes in the museum, first of the center lobby and then of the crowd around Van Gogh’s self portrait.

After the Rijksmuseum we headed for FOAM, a photography museum about 15 minutes away. FOAM had four exhibits: Julia Kochetova’s combat images from the Ukraine War; Verena Blok’s images and text about pregnancy, family, and abortion (“Love Shit”); Jasmijn Vermeeren’s multimedia exhibit about hidden disabilities (“You Don’t Look Sick”); and Martin Parr’s “Very Modern and Rather Ugly.” It also had a very nice small cafe with hot and cold drinks and lovely photographs on the wall. I had two sparkling lemon sodas.

We abandoned the idea of completing our agenda, and decided to head for the tram, and that was more than a simple stroll away. With the holiday on Monday the city had set up port-a-potties and public urinals near every canal bridge, and we passed a lot of them.

So many people on the street. So many boats in the canals. So many boats with so many people with so many improvised bars in the middle of the boats on the canals. We looked upstream and there was a celebratory flotilla heading our way, so we took ten minutes to hang over the bridge and photograph the parade. I assume it was practice for the next day when, we’ve been told, the streets are a mass of drunken people and the trams have to stop running.

We finished shooting when the flotilla ended, and continued walking towards the Rijksmuseum tram stop. Velda found some interesting bicycles and flowers, we both found an interesting foursome on a park bench, and I found an interesting door.

The tram was crowded when we boarded, and it was about 10 minutes before it thinned out enough for us to sit, which we did for the last 15 minutes of the ride. On the walk back to the hotel we encountered two families of geese, with goslings. I say two families because there were four adults in two pairs separated by about 10 meters, and a squad of goslings surrounding each pair. We approached cautiously with our cameras and they were alert but didn’t seem to care that we were there. Some bicyclists came through, and Velda shooed stray goslings from one side of the path to other. We did need to pass them in order to reach our destination, and they did hiss at us as we passed, but they didn’t chase, so that was good.

Our final destination was Q Beach, where we had dinner the night before. The signs said open, but it was closed. We finished our 13,000+ steps walking into the hotel restaurant, where we each had meals to rebuild the muscle we’d worn out that day.

Today we spent inside the hotel, catching up on work, checking in for tomorrow’s flight, confirming travel arrangements in S. Africa. Late in the afternoon we walked about 30 minutes to Badhoevedorp, had our daily meal at Selera Anda (Indonesian, similar to Panda Express), and walked back. Our daily exercise, which brought me to 8,600 steps for the day. With the hotels and the cars and the transit it’s not always easy to get exercise.