In spite of battling a cold and being a bit lonely, I'm having a lovely time here. This is an adorable city and my absolute favorite part of it is the canals and architecture of the houses lining them. Interestingly, all the ground that the city is built on is very marshy and unstable. You would think it would be very unwise to build houses here in the first place, but since it's after the fact, it's neat to see how the builders cope with such unsuitable terrain. Every house is actually built on pillars, lots of concrete (previously wooden) supports that sink down the twenty or so meters needed to hit the solid ground underneath. In this way the houses should remain stable, but that actually doesn't prevent them from leaning, as I've seen walking around the city and on my canal tour today. I tried to take some pictures to show the leaning, but it's harder to see in the photos; it's much more pronounced in real life - almost to a Dr. Seuss effect.
Another interesting Dutch architecture feature, at least from back in the day, is their obsession with symmetry. I've toured some of the older buildings that have been preserved from the Dutch Golden Age, and a common theme with them is the inclusion of fake doors in rooms. This is done for the sole reason of making the interior of the room symmetrical. For example if their's a real door on the right side of the wall, the owner would then have a fake door installed in the left side of the wall. Sometimes the doors were even disguised in the case of one door in the Van Loon Museum. On one wall was a large fireplace, and so to make the room match, they had the frame of a large door installed in the wall directly across from it. The actual door makes up part of the fake door and part of the wall, as you can see in the next picture.
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| The definition of an interior design perfectionist |
Other notes - this is a great city for art lovers! One museum, the oldest in the city called the Rijkmuseum, has a great collection of works from the Golden Age Dutch masters: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Jan Steen, and many more. A side note - all the museums in Amsterdam seem to be under construction/being restored, but this actually worked in my favor in the Rijksmuseum. Instead of wandering the miles of corridors, I had all the most famous works conveniently grouped together in one hall. In addition, there is an entire separate museum dedicated just to Van Gogh, called, unsurprisingly, the Van Gogh Museum. This museum was set up with his works in chronological order, giving an interesting perspective into the maturation of his style, and also with the mental illness he suffered from.
Amsterdam is a small city, especially in comparison to my recent sojourn in London, and so I've seen all the highlights in the three days I've been here so far. Therefore after my planned excursion out into the Dutch countryside to see the windmills tomorrow, I think I'm going to cut Amsterdam a day short and head to Brussels. I'll keep you updated!
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