I have Van Gogh's ear for music...
May. 7th, 2009 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bcholmesBack in 1994, I went to work in the Netherlands for about 4 months. Over the course of my stay, I crashed in a coupl'a different hotels in Amsterdam, and drove, each weekday, to a nearby town called Uithoorn. Uithoorn is a lot like Markham. Unless you're going to the IBM office, there's just no reason to go there.
So now the_siobhan and I are in Amsterdam and I'm realizing that, zowie, 15 years is a long time. The neighbourhood that I'm in at the moment is all modern and chichi. The Van Gogh museum is larger and more spacious, with a lower gallery for special shows. It looks like the Redon pieces are now part of their permanent collections.
Kalverstraat seems to have gone all Queen St. West, with American fashion chains squeezing out all the little interesting shops. The city seems more affluent than when I was here last, but at the cost that some parts of it seem completely identical to all the other places in the world. Oh, look. The Body Shop. And a Nike store.
Today was standard touristy stuff. Rijksmuseum, and Van Gogh museum. Hiked up to the Dam and then twisted through some of the streets looking at canals and "coffeeshops" and gazillions of people riding bicycles. And I mean metric gazillions; not the old, imperial kind.
One of the bits that I learned about Van Gogh, this time 'round, was that one of his inspirations was Japanese prints. He even painted a handful of clearly Japanese-themed paintings (I'm fond of this one especially). The composition of these pieces were pretty much stolen from Japanese prints, but Van Gogh's colour style is very distinctly his own.
Tonight, we dined on Indonesian food, and as we walked back to the hotel, Sio was reading posters. One such poster seemed to suggest that Journey is playing here. Sio snorted. "Blast from the past," she said.
The rest of the way back to the hotel, I had "Don't stop believing..." running around in my head, which, y'know... Tony Soprano.
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Date: 2009-05-09 02:49 am (UTC)