I spent a few days back in Amsterdam crashing at Jen and Mark’s place and exploring the city while they were off at work. The first day was spent just wandering around the canal district. Apparently the “Venice of the north” has over 100km of canals and 1,500 bridges, but I didn’t check the validity of that factoid. What is interesting though is the layout of the canals. In the old part of town, laid out in the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century, town planning decided to build a series of semi-circular canals which linked in at both ends to the harbour. The design was practical both for defence and transport of goods (beer was specifically mentioned a couple of times).

On my first day the weather was good, but it’s been pretty awful ever since. As a result, most of the rest of my sightseeing was indoors, though Amsterdam does have some cool museums. I checked out the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum and Anne Frank house. As well as seeing some of Van Gogh’s most famous artworks, it was really cool to see the transition of his work from his first ever oil painting, through mimicking of other artists styles and finally to his trademark style of expressive blobs of brightly coloured paint. I already knew of his mental illness, ear cutting off incident and suicide at age 37, but I didn’t realise that he only started painting at a late age and did most of his best known work in the last two years. He initially worked at an art dealership but left to do religious work, and was later largely supported by his art dealer brother, Theo, who worked hard to promote Vincent’s work both during his life and after his death.

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Tags: Amsterdam, Anne Frank House, Munich, Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh