April 13, 2010

I woke up and had breakfast at the hotel. It’s not quite as good a breakfast as what we had in Australia and New Zealand, but it wasn’t bad. The area around my hotel in the center of Utrecht is a mostly pedestrian area. There’s a canal with shops and restaurants all up and down it, sort of like in San Antonio, a bit like king street in Charleston. It goes for several blocks in all directions. There are museums and shops and pubs and restaurants of all kinds.

I made my way to the Centraal museum, and spent most of the morning and afternoon looking around. This museum has a collection of paintings from as early as the 1500s, all the way to an exhibit of modern art.

The early art was mostly religious, showing scenes from the Bible, portraits of wealthy people, and detailed still-lifes. Oddly, many of the still-lifes featured prominent dead fish, flowers that don’t bloom in the same season, and random lizards, frogs, and bugs among the flowers. The colors were usually dark backgrounds with light flowers and extreme detail, obviously requiring a very long time to complete. As I said in the previous post, I like this style of art, but I really appreciate now van Gogh’s style of painting rapidly, directly from a natural scene.

My favorite item was the doll house. It was about 6 feet wide by 6 feet high by 3 feet deep, dating to 1690 or so. The overall box was divided into sitting rooms and kitchens and bedrooms and work rooms, and each room was exquisitely detailed. There were tiny chandeliers, paintings on the ceilings, miniature glasses, and of course tiny furniture and dolls wearing 17^th century clothing. It would be impressive if made today, but given that it was all hand made in miniature in 1690, it’s just spectacular. The exhibit even had a flashlight that you could use to see all the tiny details.

There’s a famous ancient boat, possibly Viking, which was uncovered in a former river bed. It’s oddly constructed, with a large beam down the middle and ribs and an outer shell. All the pegs had rotted away but the main pieces of wood were mostly intact. They did a very good job restoring it.

In another series of rooms, there was a display of fashion, some actual garments, some advertisements. Part of the exhibit seemed very contemporary, but a lot of the black and white ads seemed sort of 60s-ish somehow. They even had a room where you could make your own version of one of the template garments, and there were indeed some women there working on just that.

With the same ticket, you can see the Dick Bruna house just across the street. It’s sort of a very small museum, not the sort of house where anyone lives. Dick Bruna is a graphic designer, well known for book covers for several series, including Black Bear, The Saint, Havank, and Maigret. He’s also very well know among children here for his books about Miffy the Rabbit. (Her Dutch name is Nijntje.) Bruna lives here in Utrecht, and I think some of the stoplights even feature Miffy. The house displays many of his illustrations and describes his style and how it developed. I think these books came out starting in the 70s, but I don’t remember them. They resemble the Japanese Hello Kitty series visually, so I guess they’re more likely to appeal to girls, and I don’t think they became popular in the US until more recently. But I could be wrong—Maybe I just missed them. Anyway, it was a fun little museum.

The next stop for me was the Musical Instrument Museum. At least, the tour book called it something that. I was expecting to see maybe old violins and such, but it’s not that kind of instrument. Its full name is something like “Play clocks to street organs” and I was pleasantly surprised by what it turned out to mean: They had cuckoo clocks, wind up automata, music boxes, player pianos, and organs that play music encoded on punched paper. The organs ranged in size from boxes you could carry, to carts you push down the street, all the way up to huge room-sized machines that could fill a dance hall with sound. And most of them work: The docent can turn them on for you, and they’re simply amazing. When record players and radios became available, these automatic instruments essentially vanished, which is too bad, but this museum is maintaining them. They even had a paper tape that caused one of them to play the Macarena, so I suppose it must be recently punched. I remember the automatic organ at the Pavillion at Myrtle Beach and how much fun it was to stop and eat ice cream and watch it work.

I found the famous Dom Toren, which is a huge church tower in central Utrecht. It used to be the tall part of a cathedral. There’s part of the rest of the cathedral near it, but at some point there was a bad storm that knocked down part of it. Apparently it wasn’t built all that well, because I’m stunned that a storm could knock over a stone building. Anyway, the cathedral lay in ruins for decades, then finally they cleared the rubble, built a new front wall, and made a new sanctuary.

I had dinner at a Greek restaurant nearby, and tried a Hoegaarden white beer. It was a good dinner, but I was surprised that the elaborately stuffed pork chops I ordered came with French fries. The restaurant wasn’t all that upscale, but it’s the sort of place where you expect, oh, something a bit more elaborate, maybe “rosemary infused asparagus with curried purée of cauliflower,” and the meal did come with cooked mixed vegetables also…. I guess I associate fries with sandwiches and fast food and steaks, so I’m surprised to see them anywhere else.

Then I went back to the hotel and crashed.