Previous (and the only time) I’ve been to Amsterdam, I’ve only been to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, and the Holland Pass listed several dozen. Since I didn’t know much about either of them, I left it to the app to choose. In the end, we did everything, except for one – the Anne Frank House.
For this latter one when I’ve started to explore my options about three weeks before our vacation, I’ve found out that it’s already too late to book advanced tickets, and my only option is to catch the “same day” tickets at 9 AM whatever day is it. We tried to stay in the virtual line on Saturday morning (our Day Two), but when it was our turn, the available times were only late in the afternoon, and we already had a trip to Delft booked for that time. I’ve tried one more time on Sunday morning and reached my turn quite fast, but whenever I was trying to book tickets for available slots, it would tell me – sorry, there are no more tickets … I could not continue these experiments, as for the next two days Boris was already at the conference, at least for a part of the day, so there was no Anne Frank for us this time.
We’ve been to Van Loon House Museum, and this was quite interesting. Willem Van Loom was a co-founder of Dutch East India Company at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, and since then the history of the family was closely intertwined with the history of Amsterdam.
The house was built in 1672, but the interior was completely redone in the middle of the 18th century in a more popular Loui XV style.
This was the first house we saw on this trip, and later we saw the similar features in the other homes. Many of them look very much like the palaces in Saint Petersburg, where we both are from. No wonder, since Holland was a model for life transformation in the18th century Russia. But what I really liked in all of these museums was the fact that the living spaces on exhibit were not separated from the visitors by ropes, you could actually walk around each and single room and take a close look at all of the objects on display.
You can see now what I meant, that you can walk anywhere in the rooms! I could even open this box:
Now look closely at the door below – can you notice something?!
It’s only a half-door, but for the reasons of symmetry the left side was added :). Actually, there are several false doors in the house, all for the same reason to keep it symmetrical!
The most interesting part is the basement.
This box with livery buttons was found fairly recently; some buttons were still wrapped into the pieces of 100-years old newspaper! These buttons took a long time to be manufactured, so they were ordered in excessive quantities for future usage:
The kitchen is amazing!
I could not keep my eyes off this stove! Such a work of art! And no explanation of it[s construction, unfortunately.
The garden is a typical, but still gorgeous 18th century garden:
One more museum we’ve visited on Day Two was a Huis Marseille photography museum. It was one of the recommended by the VisitACity app, and it was definitely interesting, but most likely, I won’t choose it if I will be creating my itinerary. I liked how the old buildings are repurposed, and I liked some of the works, especially the underwater photography, but I was not super-excited by it.
Once again, it turned out to be not an easy task to find lunch, although there are multiple food options literally on every corner. We finally sat down in an “OK” place, where I’ve got a smoked salmon salad.
The rest of Day Two was a bus tour to Delft, which will be covered in the net travel post.
Hettie's Reflections 