Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe

Happy Easter everyone! Another fantastic and busy day in Berlin! Today we went to the old part of Berlin and then to the center of East Berlin. There we saw the East Side Gallery which is where the wall is still standing and they have painted it. More on this to come! After that we had a break then went to another Osterfeuer which was not as good as yesterday's. And then we had wiener schnitzel for dinner. With yet another kind of beer! A great day!!

Here is a picture from Friday at the big memorial for the murdered Jews. It is very large and peaceful inside an area with a lot of pillars of different heights.

Osterfeuer

Day 2 in Berlin was even better than Day 1!! We went to Potsdam, which is 30 min from Belin and has a lot of really amazing Palaces from the 18th century. More to come on these! After the Palaces we had a great dinner at a German restaurant (I had a soup with a fancy German name that turned out to be suspiciously like a very good chilli) and then we went to this fantastic tradition - the Osterfeuer. This is a big fire that they have in each village in Germany on Easter weekend to chase away the ghost of winter. We sure need it chased away in this part of Europe right now!! You drink a lot of beer and a hot mulled wine called Gluehwein and watch a massive bonfire.

Here is a picture!! Happy Easter Everyone!!

Berlin!

Fantastic day one in Berlin with my friend Jan (who is German but we met in Costa Rica last year). Here we are at Checkpoint Charlie. Too tired to write more at the moment!

Best job ever?

So I might just have the best job ever. It's been a long week but a 4-day weekend is right around the corner. I left work at 3:30, went back to my hotel, packed up my stuff (I'm going to Berlin tomorrow!!!) and now am settled into the Executive Lounge to finish my work. This is my view:

First the diet coke, gourmet cheese, nuts, and smoked salmon. Then the wine and warm canapés. Life sure is rough!

Peter de Grote and the Hermitage

Another day of work done!! And only one more day to work this week before the 4-day long weekend for Easter! Nice life in Europe eh?

Here's another gem from the weekend (Daddy this one is for you!):

"Peter the Great - an inspired Tsar" was one of the two exhibits at the Hermitage when I visited last Saturday. It was an exhibit of his life - his history, how he lived, and the art and antiques he collected. I found the things in the exhibit a tad boring, but found his life to be quite interesting and inspiring. For more details click here.

Facts about Peter the Great that I appreciated:
Peter the Great:

• Ascended to the throne at aged 17 and was determined to lift his country out of the Middle Ages (this was the 17th century)
• Travelled to western Europe to learn how to do this. He learnt 17 different trades (including blacksmithing, ship-building, anatomy - so he could teach his army medicine, printing, and how to extract teeth)
• Decided that women should be able to ascend to the throne (and after his death his wife was the first Tsaritsa
• Started the first museum in Russia to encourage everyone to learn, established the first Russian newspaper, and secularized schools
• Loved Amsterdam and wanted to build a new Russian capital based on it (St. Petersburg). However after his death it developed more in the style of Paris

Of course he also had a lot of success in wars, etc, but they didn't seem as interesting to me. Amongst his collections were preserved body parts that were totally fascinating - a child's head and arm amongst them!

This is a picture of the Hermitage from the outside (no photos allowed inside). The other exhibit was "Vincent" (van Gogh) but I didn't find it overly interesting unfortunately. The Hermitage is located right on the Amstel river and has two exhibits each year. While the Van Gogh museum is under construction the second exhibit is Vincent.

Museum Willet-Holthuysen

Another day filled with work .... But another blog about fun things from last weekend!!

The only museum the hotel didn't recommend was the only one I was really excited about - the Willet-Holthuysen, a historical canal house preserved and beautifully decorated. The audio tour was incredibly informative and I could bore you with pages and pages of details. I'll try to keep it brief!

In the 17th century the wealthy in Amsterdam lived in canal houses. Most were 6m across but quite deep plots of land with big gardens in the back. The wealthiest had 10 or 12m wide houses. The biggest could have as many as 40 rooms! The family lived mostly on the first and second floors (although first floors here are all called floor 0, even in my hotel) and the servants had the basement and the top floor.

The houses were beautifully decorated with marble, rugs, and lots of art. When the couple (Willet-Holthuysen) died they left the house to the city to be turned into a museum.

I really would have liked to live in one of these houses!

The canals

Well it has a been a busy start to the week at work. Just heading back to my hotel now. Luckily I had a blog entry in the archives for you!! Enjoy!! (More than one picture today. I'm over-delivering!)

Canals in Amsterdam are everywhere. There are about 100km of them, and about 1500 bridges. To me they all look the same so it is easy to get lost! Last Saturday I took a one-hour canal tour which was a nice way to get a different perspective on the city. Most of the canals are also very old - the three main ones were dug in the 17th century (and were semi-circular concentric canals)! Unbelievably they were designed for mainly residential purposes (and also to help move goods around the city).

Today lots of people live along the canals (and on them - houseboats!!) and there is a canal bus that has three routes as well. In the winter they freeze and people skate on them (new ambition to come back in the winter, forget the Ottawa Canal!) and in the summer there are lots of boats out and they are also used for parades.

Another fun fact: the canal system is totally flushed three times a week when the locks are open and the water flows in from the North Sea. That's a lot of flushing!! They are 2-3 meters deep and range in width up to 31 meters wide.

That's enough chit-chat, here are some pictures! (They were taken through a dirty boat window so aren't as great as they could be!)

The Stedelijk and Day Two as a Tourist

Today was a slightly less busy version of yesterday,with less time spent outside because although it was sunnier it was way windier and quite unpleasant!

The first stop today was the Stedelijk, Amsterdam's museum of modern art. I found it much more interesting than the Hermitage. There were four main sections - "Design," "Pre-1950" and "Post-1950" are the permanent collections, with a visiting collection from Mike Kelly, an American artist who died last year. I liked the pre-1950 and post-1950 collections best. You can only look at typography and furniture (and toasters and spoons and such) for so long before thinking "this is insane" - but the Design exhibit did a good job of linking the works into Dutch culture and what was going on in history. The Mike Kelly exhibit was just weird - he was a rather crass and strange artist who I just don't appreciate. The other two exhibits were a mix of Dutch artists and more famous ones (a few Picasos, a Wharhol, some Matisse, and a Pollock). The audio tour also made it slightly more interesting to look at a white canvas with two black lines painted on it. I still think I could have done some of them!!

The building was also very nice (picture below) - old architecture with new twists both outside and in.

From there I went to the Diamond museum, then to the flower market, then to the Museum Het Grachtenhuis which is the canal museum. More on these in later posts - but the canal museum might be my most favourite of all!

I'm now back on the executive floor where they have a great selection of canapes (my dinner) and drinks. Just did a bit of work to prepare for the week, will post this, and then will perhaps see if I can find a movie on TV. The English TV here is very bad. Best show I have found so far is one where people refurbish very old cars and another about the Dog Whisperer guy that is on Discovery or something at home. Niet goed as they would say here!

Photos of the Stedelijk:

From across the street:

The entrance area. Lines get really, really big at all tourist attractions:

Looking in the entrance to the first exhibit hall. Not as good a picture as it was in my head :-)

Earth Hour

Today was an exceptionally full day. Full details will have to come in subsequent blogs (to carry us through the week and ensure there are no pictures of my computer as the most interesting thing I can think of!!) but it went something like this:

Wake up, have breakfast on the lovely executive floor, take the tram to Centraal Station. Take a 1 hour canal cruise. Take the Metro to the Hermitage which has two exhibits right now: "Peter the Great, an inspired Tsar" and "Vincent" (van Gogh). I found both a bit boring, although Peter seems like a pretty inspiring (as well as inspired) Tsar. More to come on him. I then had a quick lunch, and walked around the corner to Museum Willet-Holthuysen which was the only museum the hotel concierge did not recommend but the only one that looked interesting to me. It is a historical canal house that you can walk through with a great audio tour. Similar to the Breakers Mansions in Newport.

Then I hopped on another tram to the Amsterdam Museum and saw what I could of it in the hour before it closed. Around the corner was a nails place so I treated my at this point very tired feet to a pedicure. Also got a manicure so my hands wouldn't feel left out (they do their work typing on my computer for 14 hours a day during the week).

(Note: I was trying to squish this all in because I bought a really cool tourist card called "I Amsterdam" which gives you unlimited public transport and access to almost all of the city's museums in a 24 or 48 hour period. I got the 48 hour one because it was only 10 euros more, so tomorrow promises to be equally exhausting!)

Then I wanted to explore Chinatown for dinner, but the two very famous restaurants had very long lines and I was far too tired and it was way too cold out to wait outside for a table (especially considering it was just me, and really how many dishes can one person try). So I went to a "no name" place that was decent.

A tram ride home, and I was back at the hotel. (It took about 30 minutes to find the right tram stop to come home. I was cold and irritated.) I got back during "Earth Hour" - they lobby was all lit with candles and they were offering wine to all the hotel guests. It was really quite a beautiful display - take a look!

A first walk in Amsterdam

This afternoon I took an hour off of work to walk around the part of Amsterdam that is close to our office. It was a sunny day compared to the rest of the week and what it's supposed to be like for the rest of the weekend. But that's not saying a whole lot as you can tell by this picture! I wandered around the canals looking at the beautiful houses. It was super cold and windy though, and was actually pretty glad to be back at the office after an hour! Here's one of the prettier pictures I took!

KLM House

So perhaps it wasn't the most interesting day for pictures. Stick with me though - the weekend is coming soon and I will have lots to share next week!

This is a picture of a model of a house in Amsterdam. KLM gives them out on their business class flights and people collect them. There are tons of different ones, apparently modelled after real houses. You can see the size; my computer is in the background. (Because it is 10:30pm and I am just finishing working. But I did go for a wonderful run today. On the treadmill because it was already dark outside, but I'm looking forward to running by the canals this weekend.)

Bikes

Bikes are everywhere here. I have heard more stories about how firmly bikes are embedded in Dutch culture than I have about anything else (cheese, clogs, the colour orange). There are 800-900,000 people in Amsterdam. And 1.2 million bikes. My taxi almost hit someone biking while carrying a bass under one arm. The instrument, not the fish. All of the bikes look the same, and like they came out of the 50s. It is very neat. I took this picture of some packed bike racks on my way to work this morning. Apparently there are two buildings of 4 stories each at the central train station just for parking bikes. And they don't have enough space. Will have to upgrade to a picture of that when I can get one. For now, here is the mini pile of bikes:

If you can't see it well try clicking on the picture. Considering the number of lanes of traffic I had to take it across I consider it quite impressive :-)

Gouda!

There are lots of great meal options where I'm working, but unfortunately my temporary badge only lets me access the sandwich bar. I'm working on getting that fixed! Today's picture is of a sandwich, featuring Gouda cheese. It hasn't been the most exciting day - very busy with work, and thought this would be more interesting than my desk at least!

Day One!

I have arrived! If anything the flight was too short - not enough time to sleep! I am at my hotel now; just time to shower and have breakfast then it's off to work. I have a lovely view from my window:

On my way!

Hello everyone! I am on the plane headed to Amsterdam for two months for work. I'm going to try a photoblog for you all this time. Hopefully there won't be too many pictures of my desk! Right now I am on the plane waiting to head out. I'm on the top deck - super cool! Take a look!