a netherlands teaser

This was always going to be ambitious. One weekend, three cities. Den Haag, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and a visit to Kinderdijk thrown in for good measure. It was good, tiring, and fun. And in the end it was easy to conclude: you've got to spend more than just a weekend in the Netherlands!

I arrived late in the evening on Friday, and met up with Carmen, Cynthia, and Roland. We had our own personal tour guide as Roland is from Rotterdam, but now lives in London. They'd been touring around before I got there, and so they met me for drinks in Den Haag after I arrived. Since the weather was good there were plenty of locals out drinking too. Den Haag has some old squares where you can buy drinks in the bars, and then take them out into the square which has tables and chairs set up. It's all very cool.

Saturday was reserved for Amsterdam. We took a canal tour that let us travel around the city at our own pace. We hopped off at the Rijksmuseum, home of many Rembrandt paintings. In addition to its' most famous images, the museum also documents a lot of the Netherlands "golden age": when trade, rather than a monarch or a religion, ruled the land; when the Dutch East and West India companies were trading and bringing back treasures from around the globe - either that or stealing them from the Portuguese!

The detail in the paintings surprised me. Some of the paintings depicted scenes with shiny metal objects, and the painter went to the effort of painting the reflection of other objects in the painting on the shiny surfaces. It made me laugh as I thought this must have been the equivalent of 18th-century gamers: always aiming to get more and more rendered realism, more pixels, more detail.

What better than to follow up a museum visit on a nice day, than with a walk in a park. With spring well and truly established, Amsterdam locals were out in force. It was so nice to see people cycling, lounging around, drinking, and generally not being in any kind of a hurry. Not hurrying also applied to the waitresses at lunch... slowest service... ever... Did we mind though? Nah, it was nice sitting in the sun.

It would have been nice to do what these locals were doing. Having wine and cheese in their very own canal boat.

The conundrum of the how long to spend at lunch - and when to get back on the tour boat to see more of the city - pushed us to keep moving on in the end. We sailed up to Anne Frank's house. This was a far more sombre affair contrasted with the Rijksmuseum. The later celebrated the Netherlands golden age, where as the former commemorated some of the Netherlands darkest years. The house tells the story of Anne and her close friends and relatives. It also explains the story of all the Dutch Jews. Of around 100,000 Jewish residents in the Netherlands, a puny 5,000 survived world war II. The quote from a holocaust survivor in the guide book accurately sums this up for me:

One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.

First impression of the house is that it is bigger than you imagine it would have been. Then it dawns: this was Anne and her seven relatives and friends home/prison for two years straight. The windows were blacked out, so there was no sunshine. And when it all came down to it, after two years in the dark, they were betrayed and sent to concentration camps. So it goes.

By the time we concluded our lap of Amsterdam by boat the sun was starting to dip in the sky.

At night the landscape changes... to a wonderful shade of dodgy red. You may have heard of the Amsterdam red-light district. Well, it's not so much a district, more like... most of the alleys and lane ways in the centre of town. Fun. Strange. Dodgy. Tourist attraction. Drug dealers. Drunks. Tits.

We didn't stay too late in Amsterdam because we wanted to avoid having to catch the night train back to Den Haag (which stops all stations).

The next day took us to Rotterdam. The most modern of the three cities, mainly because the Germans destroyed most of it in 1940 when they invaded. This has liberated Rotterdam from heritage that might have stopped them building interesting looking things like these apartments:

Bizarre aren't they? I'd love to return and see more of Rotterdam's modern architecture. Time constraints meant we had to move on, catch a boat, and see the most quintessential of all Dutch symbols.

That's right, no whirlwind trip to the Netherlands would be complete without a trip to see some windmills. We visited Kinderdijk, a world heritage listed collection of 16 windmills including one we could go inside and check out 17th century engineering.

Ingenious design really: the wind turns the wheel, which turns a drive shaft through the middle of the building. This turns either a worm drive type arrangement, or a water wheel, to move water from lower ground to higher ground. This allowed the Dutch to move flood-water out of the fields into the canals and rivers quicker that it would naturally drain. Fields were back in production quicker after heavy rain. If only Australia had this problem! You can solve flooding with 17th century techniques, but there is no solution to drought.

All too soon it was time to head back to the airport, with a vow to return.

hanoi's cultural sites

Work today (Sunday) has been cancelled!. I took the opportunity to sleep in : ) The hotel had an Easter Sunday brunch, which was good because it didn't start until late in the morning... making it quite compatible with sleeping in! This afternoon, one of the local engineers is going to take Mark and I out somewhere in Hanoi. But for now I've got some time to write about yesterday's touring.

Yesterday I went and toured some of Hanoi's cultural sites: the Temple of Literature, the Museum of Fine Arts and, the Army Museum. Along the way I also walked through Lenin Park. I quite like the way Hanoi has parks and lakes scattered throughout the town. They provide some relief from the busy streets. Lenin Park, as the name suggests, is named after Vladimir Lenin. It has a statue of Lenin, which the local kids were climbing all over. I missed getting a photo of them all over him, but here they are afterwards, posing:

The Temple of Literature, or Văn Miếu, also had nice gardens. It was founded in 1070 as a Confucian temple, but 6 years later became Vietnam's first university. Some of the architecture is from the 11th century. It is probably the only place in the country that has architecture that old.

Of course over the centuries the temple has had a few additions. The most historically significant addition is the stone steles which record every doctor laureate who graduated from 1484 onwards. These steles are mounted on the backs of stone turtles - one of the symbolically important animals in Vietnam. Turtles indicate stability, and the king of the time recognised the importance of having well educated subjects.

This reads "... virtuous and talented men are state-sustaining elements: The strength and the prosperity of a state depend on its stable vitality and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails. That is why all the saint emperors and clear-sighted kings didn't fail in seeing to the development of men of talent and the employment of literati to develop this vitality."

Over the next 300 years the names, and birth-places, of 1,306 graduates were recorded on these stones. The kings themselves set the questions of the final examinations. I saw some paintings in the museum I visited next, which showed the joy of the villagers when a graduate returns to their home town.

These days the temple is used for ceremonies, and hosts (according to the taxi driver) around 1,000,000 tourists a year. Out the front of the temple there is a stone commanding horsemen dismount before entering. These days however, there is motorcycle parking inside the grounds, and they don't have to dismount before entering!

Next I wandered over to the Museum of Fine Arts. This is housed in a massive French colonial building. Unfortunately camera's were not permitted inside the Museum, so again the quality of the photos is not so good as I had to surreptitiously use my mobile phone camera. I visited the ceramics exhibition first, but I found that pretty boring and moved on quickly. Next I visited the exhibition of native Vietnamese costumes. These were slightly more interesting, but didn't hold my attention for long. Then I came to the contemporary art exhibition. This was fantastic! Of course war has heavily influenced the previous 2 or 3 generations of Vietnamese, and this was reflected in the paintings and sculptures exhibited.

In the late 1940's and early 1950's the Vietnamese fought the French, in an attempt to gain independence. The above painting illustrates the jungle on fire, with an anti-aircraft missile chasing an unseen French aircraft. Below is a painting that depicts Việt Minh tanks rolling into Saigon in 1975. The paintings were quite compelling, and I'd recommend going to see them. There are easily more than 100 items in the contemporary exhibition.

Lacquer is a traditional Vietnamese material used by artists as there are native trees that produce lacquer. Most of the the paintings, old and new, were lacquer paintings. The sculptures were all made of bronze, and this was also a traditional Vietnamese material.

Before leaving I also visited an exhibition of some uncommon Buddhist sculptures from the 1800's. Uncommon because instead of depicting religious figures, they depicted ordinary people. It has been suggested that the artists used the religion as an excuse to produce sculptures, and maybe obtain funding. In actual fact they wanted to do their own thing, so it was only very loosely tied back to Buddhism. Luckily for the artists, the king at the time (who was Buddhist) really liked them and used them to decorate his court. The king was on to something too, I quite liked them as well!

Moving on now to the Army Museum, I arrived at the same time as three bus-loads of young army recruits. As part of their training they must have to learn about Vietnamese military history. There's plenty to learn too! While the museum focuses mainly on the war with the French, there are significant amounts of captured American hardware, as well as smaller exhibits of ancient weapons. In this photo the recruits are being told about a captured French artillery piece:

I suspect the communist party had a fair say in the exhibits of the Army Museum as everything always pointed to Vietnamese victories. Furthermore I was surprised at the emphasis placed on the war with the French. It seems that this war was more important in the minds of the Vietnamese. Sometimes some of the translations might have been a bit askew, such as the caption on a French helmet riddled with bullet holes: "a steel helmet - evidence of the failure of the French".

I'd always (mistakenly) thought that the war between the Americans (and Australians) and the Vietnamese was between well equipped armies and guerillas. I hadn't realised that the Chinese and Soviets had equipped the Vietnamese too, and that it was a war between two well equipped sides. The Vietnamese had MiG fighter jets, tanks and anti-aircraft armaments. They shot down over 2,000 American aircraft. In addition they captured more aircraft when they took airfields along the way. In a funny kind of communist way, people can be heroes of the republic, but so can pieces of equipment! This MiG-21 fighter is a hero of the Vietnamese republic for shooting down 14 aircraft:

The museum also featured some war-based artwork. There were some paintings inside, and a few sculptures scattered around outside. One sculpture was a massive combobulation of different pieces of destroyed French and American aircraft. Below is a photo of just one jet engine amongst all the different parts:

Outside the museums, I had to tell a few enterprising locals that I didn't want to take a motorcycle back to the hotel, I'd much prefer a taxi. It was well after lunch time, and I was pretty hungry. After 2 weeks of having Vietnamese lunches I really really wanted a sandwich. Hence I used room service for the first time, and ordered a club sandwich and a coffee. It was pretty good : )