Bliss is finding the perfect coffee in the first cafe you try in a new city. It's just down the road from my hotel and I passed by several carts of apple tarts before I settled on this place, and it really was GREAT coffee. Such a welcome relief after English coffee. But I think I'll stop for the apple tarts tomorrow morning and then on to the cafe for coffee. It's always good to have plan.
Speaking of which...I did have a plan for Amsterdam which included using the trams as part of a city card thing. But they don't sell them at my hotel and it was a beautiful sunny day so I decided to see how far I could get on foot. Quite far it seems. It was a lovely walk to my first stop. It's Sunday morning so the occasional church bells accompanied my journey through Amsterdam streets full of terraced houses, a nice park with a pond (lots of birds - swans, seagulls, ducks, possibly ravens), some interesting wood animal/dinosaur sculptures, a bunch of people doing aerobics, playing three on three soccer and other various exercises including a game of table tennis (the tables are part of the fitness circuit).
My first stop, Tropenmuseum was easy to find - no need to resort to map and identify myself as a tourist. It's basically a museum about other cultures and has exhibits from India, Asia, Papua New Guinea for example. All reasonably interactive and mildly interesting but the highlights for me were the music room which has a bit of a history of musical instruments. It also has a Forgotten Song archive room where you go into a soundproof room (at least I hope it was) and sing a song that is then recorded in the archive. The idea is to sing something old and relatively unknown. I sang 'One day a Taniwha'. Well four lines of it that I could remember anyway.
The most interesting exhibit was a temporary exhibit called Black and White. It explores Holland's history of the slave trade where Dutch ships took Africans from Suriname into the slavery in America. And then the slow change of the Dutch population to include more Blacks and the various discrimination. It seeks to ask the question whether the Netherlands is now a more egalitarian society. Except it doesn't. The first exhibit I saw, a piece of art showing a Black man holding a white baby seeks to challenge our perceptions and reactions. It was great. The rest of the exhibition asks provocative questions, but then asks another question that basically provides an excuse for racism. One such is a photo of the Dutch football team eating lunch where all the Black players are at one table and the white players are separate tables. I can't remember the exact questions but it basically asks if this was an example of racism or if people of the same culture (i.e. colour) naturally congregate together.
The walk to my next stop took me past the Zoo. You can see a bit through the fences including large white dinosaur statues (no idea why), some palm trees with pumpkins growing underneath them, and some lovely pink flamingos.
I think the Dutch Resistance Museum is misnamed. There is a great video at the beginning which talks about how during WW2 the Dutch people had to adjust, collaborate or resist and says that the Museum will explain why people made particular choices. Except it doesn't.
The opening video tells you that the Netherlands tried to be neutral as it had in WW1, but the Germans attacked Rotterdam and 80 people died so the Dutch surrendered. I was initially a bit miffed at this bit of information. Even one person is one to many, but the numbers are tiny compared to the 40,000 British who died during the Blitz (numbers courtesy of wikipedia - my historian friends will be horrified at this as my source). Further into the exhibition, it explains that the Dutch army were weak and that the country really didn't have the ability to fight back so I left off being miffed. But the surrender did not save the Dutch people: 300,000 civilians died - that's about 3.5% of the population. A third of those who died were Jews. Approximately 140,000 Jews lived in Holland before the war. About 30,000 of these people survived.
But I've wandered off into a history lesson. Much of the display is about the people who adjusted. Admittedly, this is the majority of the population, but it's called the *resistance* museum so I really wanted more on this. But you only really get tidbits: university students who refused to sign up to a non-protest agreement, so many of them refused that the Nazis closed down the universities; trade unions that got taken over by Nazis so the membership dropped to almost nothing; doctors who were required to join some Nazi organisation to be registered so most decided to forego their registration (but continued to provide health care); and the underground printing presses.
One thing I really liked about the museum. It's use of the word 'murdered' instead of 'killed'. We often say X number of people died in the war. But this museum is very clear. They were murdered by the Nazis.
Next, I headed for NEMO. No, not an animated fish, a science and technology museum which was fantastic. It's really a kids museum - everything is interactive, and it's school holidays so it was packed. There's a giant chain reaction demonstration that goes over 3 stories of the inner 'courtyard' area. I loved making these a kid so me and the 5 year olds ooohed and ahhed a lot. There's an bubble area where you can blow bubbles or make a bubble that surrounds you for example. There's an outside area that looks out over the city from five stories up and had puzzles. (One for you to do at home: take the numbers 1 to 9 and arrange them in a three by three grid so that the numbers across, down and diagonally add to 15. I'll post the solution on facebook in a couple of days.) There's an area on sex which has little wooden figures demonstrating a number of positions from the kama sutra, a giant french kissing machine where you used your arm to move around the 'tongues' and a condom classification system that had me giggling. There's a lab that you can go into and do some experiments (the queue was too long so I skipped this). I think I spent about two hours on the four floors of displays.
It was getting dark by the time I left so I headed for home, and stumbled across the light festival on my way. All around one section of the city, artists have set up works where light is the main theme. I've posted some pics on facebook of them. I did get a little bit lost on the way home and was starting to worry until I peered into someone's living room and saw that is wasn't even 6pm yet. So I enjoyed the walk back with the various Christmas decorations along the way, and then had a quiet pizza for dinner before relaxing in the hotel spa.
