Friday, 8 September 2017 to Thursday, 14 September 2017
A grey and gloomy looking day greeted us Friday morning. It was misty all around; it was raining felines and hounds out there. Late morning the rain petered out to nothing and then repeated the same cycle… over and over again throughout the day.

During one of these lulls we slipped out to the Jumbo Supermarket for some sorely needed food stuffs. By the time we finished shopping it was raining on our parade once again. Fortunately Adri, the one with the good sense, took an umbrella along, we got home mostly dry.

I received some unwanted news today. The geyser in my Johannesburg home that I’m renting out had burst. Damn, these things always happen when you’re not looking. But, after a call to my trusty plumber and Standard Bank’s home insurance division, all was sorted out and within a few hours a brand new geyser was installed. Well done to Standard Bank for their professional and speedy service, Zandile was a pure pleasure to deal with.

We spent to whole day busying ourselves with admin and such, there was no way we could go out it this dreary wet weather. Man, I wished for a days of rays.

Saturday morning I read that Don Williams had passed away and I felt a tinge of sadness cross my mind. Although I am not much of a country music fan I still enjoyed a lot of his music back in the 70s and 80s. Who can forget those great 70/80s songs like I Recall A Gypsy Woman, You’re My Best Friend, Tulsa Time, Some Broken Hearts Never Mend, Lay Down Beside Me, and my personal favourite at that time, Amanda.

We had a lazy Saturday morning while I indulged in some rugby. I watched both the New Zealand/Argentina game as well as the SA/Aussie game. The less said about the latter game the better, I felt SA played a disjointed game and did not live up to the expectation they had created, I think they were lucky to draw the game at 23 all.

 

 

 

 

It was past midday that we took Tram 10 to the Spiegelgracht stop, we had to fetch the envelope that Lood had sent us from SA via DHL. From the tram stop we trundled through the walkway underneath the Rijksmuseum where we listened to classical music by three street performers, we then found the “I Amsterdam” sign, walked through the Museumplein park, past the Van Gogh and Stedelijk Museums, turned left with The Concertgebouw now on our right. It’s hard to believe that there is so much culture in an area not much larger than the size of a big city block.

 

 

We carried on past The Concertgebouw and 100 metres further we finally found what we were looking for. We picked up the parcel without raising even one eyebrow, checked its contents and all was safely stowed in there. Thanks Lood!

 

 

 

 

 

From there we ambled on to the Albert Cuyp Market which takes place every day of the week except Sundays… we were in luck. This market is not unlike many other markets, it has almost anything you could wish to buy, in a market kind of a way at least. Adri was trailing behind as I passed the herring stall. I knew it was futile to continue, Adri would not pass this up. As she ordered hers, this time without a bread-roll, the lady remarked “Just as well, we’ve just run out of bread-rolls”. Business was brisk. Adri’s herring was served with chopped onions and a large sliced up gherkin. She went back for another fat gherkin and the man wanted to charge her €7.50! He was just kidding though.

We’ve often seen these Dutch Stroopwafel but never had the pleasure of meeting any… until today that is. One of the stalls had freshly prepared ones dripping with syrup; we could not, and did not, let this opportunity pass us by. These normally come in a pack of 10 wrapped in plastic, with its weight far beyond what you would expect. Man, these things are scrumptious; never leave Amsterdam without trying them.

Next up was the fresh produce market where we got a punnet of fresh black raspberries, haven’t had those in many yonks, the punnet emptied itself right there on the spot.

 

Next up we came to a bakery stall with a very friendly lady in attendance. I spied a sausage roll, I had to further feed my craving for those and threw one down the pie hole… Oh, and we also got a lovely fresh whole-wheat loaf of bread from her… there will be no need for supper tonight… There will however be space for those huge slices of apple pie that we still had at home, topped with vanilla ice cream and all.

After stuffing our faces we very slowly made our way to the Frederiksplein tram stop… we picked up speed once we were safely on the tram. Adri sat next to a lovely young lass who had a young black Frenchman called Cooper on her lap. It was in fact a French bulldog, what a beautiful creature it was. We started chatting and patting Cooper, a really friendly fellow that would lick you to death if you allowed him to. What a nice lass… what a nice… oh , forget about the dog.

The sun was shining brightly Sunday morning and Adri planned to go into central Amsterdam for a walk around while I suffered in silence, trying to get dome blogging done. But, by the time she was ready to leave, the wind outside was gusting off the charts and clouds had moved in, growing greyer by the minute. That put paid to her joint… I mean jaunt.

Hurricane Irma was big news and we had been following her path of destruction through the Caribbean Islands of Barbuda, St. Barts, St Martin, the US Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands. She passed by Puerto Rico and Cuba and then she was on to the Bahamas and eventually would trash the Florida Keys and roll up the west coast of Florida. Wow, the power of that Category 5 hurricane delivered near total destruction on many of these small and exposed islands that dared get into her way.

One felt the people’s despair when looking at the damage caused on some of these islands, some had nothing, now they had less. Seeing the devastation particularly on St. Martin really got to me as we had a connection to this island. It was back in October 1999 that Adri and I experienced our first and thankfully only hurricane there. Hurricane Josè, a Category 2 at the time, ripped through this tiny half French half Dutch island and at Category 2 it was terrifying enough; heaven knows what a Category 5 must feel like to live through.

 

 

Later on in the evening we watched the US open Tennis final between Nadal and SA’s Kevin Anderson. I never gave Kevin a chance of winning, but was hoping that he would at least put up a good fight and make Nadal feel that he earned his prize money. Nadal barely worked up a sweat in his three set defeat of Anderson… at least it wasn’t a total whitewash; Kevin did put up some resistance of note from time to time.

It was close to 01:30 when we switched off, it was raining hard outside, the wind was howling like a she-wolf in labour… sleep came quickly.

Monday the weather was weirder than normal. We woke up to rain pelting against the windows and the wind howling around the building. By the time I had my second cup of coffee the sun was shining brightly as a boned boot. This was sort of normal but then the weirdness started. It would rain for 15 minutes, then the sun would be out for 15 minutes… and this pattern repeated itself throughout the day. Crazy.

You may remember that I booked a car at Budget Rentals through Rentalcars.com a while back. As the start of that rental is fast approaching I thought it a good idea to follow up on the booking. I tried calling budget but had no luck getting through. I then sent an email with my query and received a response that read “We are investigating and will endeavour to respond to you within 10 to 15 days.” “Uhm, but my rental starts in five days!” I suppressed my urge to respond as such to the “no-reply” email sender. I then finally got hold of them on the phone and of course they had no notion of my reference number; it was a Rentalcars.com reference number… apparently.

During my conversation with Budget I found out that they do not allow one-way rentals although Avis, who is in the same stable does, at an extra cost of course. We were tinkering with the idea of dropping the car off in another country but that thought was now put to bed, ain’t possible with Budget. This of course meant that we’ll be back in Amsterdam mid October.

I contacted Rentalcars.com directly in the UK and they confirmed that all was in order and also provided me with the Budget reference number. I was pretty impressed with the service I have received from them thus far, but the final litmus test is on Saturday, when we pick the car up to start making our way to Slovenia.

We needed a few things from the supermarket and we had to time our getaway between showers, mother nature’s showers that is. As we left the building we bumped into Renate – not to be confused with Renate from Setè – and chatted to her for too long, it started to rain again. We borrowed her umbrella and by the time we got to the supermarket it had stopped. While shopping it started raining again and as we left, it stopped. Crazy.

Tonight we were going Thai with a Massaman curry. While my treat was being prepared I nursed another one of my treats, a Franziskaner Weissbier, which bought back inevitably good memories. When the beer importers in SA stopped importing my favourite Hoegaarden, after years of neglect I bumped into a Franziskaner which was the closest thing I could get to a Hoegaarden. So, Franziskaner became my go to beer and thus have a very special place in my heart of beer hearts.

And was the Massaman curry great! As we ripped through this delicious meal we mulled over going back to Thailand sometime. While we were in Thailand I longed for farang food but truth be told, one can make almost any of the farang dishes you crave with mostly locally available ingredients. Hmm, now there’s a thought.

Tuesday we had to be at Zuid-Afrikahuis at 11:00, it was 10:30 when we left and boarded Tram 26. We were nearing Central Station when Adri spun around on her heels and shot me an “oh shit!” look. “I forgot my glasses at home!” The tram lady conductor agreed for us to stay on the tram to head back from where we came from to pick Adri’s eyes up.

Now why would we be going to Zuid-Afrikahuis? Well, besides it managing a library with a unique collection of the biggest variety of South African literature in Europe, they also have genealogy records of Dutch people that migrated or immigrated to South Africa, so we thought we might do some digging into such records. You see, Adri’s surname is Van Deventer which means “From Deventer” and thus means that her forbears were from a town called Deventer which can be found some 120km east of Amsterdam. Ashley, who has contact with Zuid-Afrikahuis through its book club, had arranged for us to meet Corinne as a contact point. You can read all about Zuid-Afrikahuis here.

We met up with Corinne and the rest of the crew who were super friendly and helpful. We also met the retired Professor Schutte who is busy sifting through all the old archives, trying to make sense of it all and then documenting that sense. What an interesting job that must be! We also met Professor Fransjohan Pretorius who is from Pretoria and was there do to some research. Chatting about the weather it was Fransjohan who quipped that “In Holland, when you go outside and the sun is shining, you take an umbrella with!” And that just about summed up our weather experience during the last number of days.

Staring back into one’s family tree is a tough job, one would think that information in this day and modern age is readily accessible, but not so. One has to search through a maze of records and you would be lucky to find something useful. And, we were lucky! We found that Adri’s forebear married a girl by the name of Adriana, also called Ariaanje, van Deventer, born Jacobs. The interesting fact was that Ariaanje arrived in Cape Town in 1688 on exactly the same voyage as my forebear, Pierre Joubert, who arrived on the ship called Berg China. As Renate would have said “Now isn’t that something!”

We really enjoyed the few hours spent at Zuid-Afrikahuis and it was mid afternoon that we left and were greeted with a freezing wind making its way across the canal; I missed my leather jacket.

Adri needed coffee, I needed beer, Cafe Van Zuylen had both. A cappuccino and a Grimbergen Dubbel managed to make it to our table where we had a view on the world outside… peaceful, cold, but peaceful…

Wednesday we woke up to a howling wind and gray skies which made it easy to lie in for too long, but the coffee cravings got the better of me. Adri was the beneficiary of my craving, she got coffee in bed.

The wind was reported to be 51km/h with gusts obviously much higher. It seemed like I was watching hurricane Irma all over again, this time living it. Whitecaps were forming on the canal below, water was blown off the canal forming a swirling spray… and then the rain came down.

I received an email from Ashley advising that Holland was now on a Code Orange weather warning which means, as per this web site, “Be Prepared – This category of Orange level weather warnings is for weather conditions which have the capacity to impact significantly on people in the affected areas. The issue of an Orange level weather warning implies that all recipients in the affected areas should prepare themselves in an appropriate way for the anticipated conditions”.

With my second cup of boeretroos (farmer’s comfort) within easy reach I sat behind the laptop blogging, with one eye on the screen, the other on the deteriorating weather outside. Leonard Cohen sings in his song titled The Partisan “Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing, through the graves the wind is blowing, freedom soon will come; then we’ll come from the shadows”. And this is how we felt today with that howling wind, all cooped up inside until that wind disappears, then our freedom will come and we will emerge from the shadows of our home.

Yesterday I bemoaned our weather lot to Renè in Koh Samui, remembering he stated categorically earlier this year – when we were having drinks at a beach pub with him and Natty – that he would never return to his home country of Holland, purely because of the weather… this weather. I now understood his sentiments. Today he responded that the weather in Koh Samui was up and down at the moment, but still always better than in the Netherlands.

The blustering wind continued for most of the day with rain interspersed in between and it was only early evening that the wind subsided. One good thing about the weather though was that it afforded me time to catch up on my blogging. I published the latest post around 20:00 and now I am almost fully up to date, but will I keep it like that…?

Thursday morning we were almost woken up by the building cleaning guy. Adri had just gone upstairs to make coffee when the bell rang. An hour later we left him to his own devices, we hoped he could finish the job before it started raining again.

It was around 11:00 that we hopped aboard Tram 10 and made our way to Spiegelgracht tram stop for the Rijksmuseum. Our public transport card, or OV Chipkaart, had run its course. The minimum credit you’re allowed to have on the card is €20 and we’ve now gone below that limit to €19 something, we needed to top-up. Notwithstanding this, we managed to board the tram.

Adri’s inquisitiveness got the better of her; she just had to know why we were allowed to board. Sometimes it’s better to let things be but Adri insisted to complain to the conductor that we should not have been allowed on the tram. As I said, sometimes it’s better to let things be but fortunately this was not one of those times. He explained that the €20 limit only applies to trains, not to trams, metros and busses, in other words, it’s not a requirement for short journeys.

While Adri had the conductor on the line, she asked him as to the best way to get to Schiphol airport as that was where we had to pick the rental up on Saturday. He explained that if we did not want to top up our cards we needed to take Tram 10 to Leidseplein, then Tram 1 to Meer en Vaart and then catch Bus 69 to the airport. If we did top up we could use the quicker way which would be a train from central station. What an awfully nice and helpful chap.

We entered the Rijksmuseum which consists of four levels. Level 0 contains all the special collections as well as artworks dating from 1100 to 1600. Level 1 has artworks from the 18th century (1700–1800) and contains masterpieces by artists such as Troost and Vanmour as well as 19th century (1800–1900) which includes masterpieces of Van Gogh, Goya, Gabriel, Breitner as well as the iconic The Battle of Waterloo, by Jan Willem Pieneman. Level 2 has artworks from the 17th century (1600–1700) showcasing world-famous masterpieces by Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt. At the very end of the Gallery of Honour is a separate gallery dedicated to Rembrandt’s greatest masterpiece “The Night Watch”. Level 3 contains artworks from the 20th century (1900-2000).

The ticket lady suggested we start on Level 2 and work our way down from there which we adhered to as a start but would fall foul of that advice, to our own peril. We did start at Level 2 and saw the most amazing artworks from the 17th century including The Night Watch by Rembrandt and The Milkmaid by Vermeer, and so many more.

As we were moseying about, suddenly, amongst a sea of unfamiliar faces, we recognised a familiar one. Professor Pretorius, whom we met at the Zuid-Afrikahuis on Tuesday, was also admiring the artworks… what were the odds on meeting up with him there…Wow!

Anyway, we got chatting to Fransjohan, who used to be Frans-Johan but by the time he was 14 he got peeved with people calling him Frans, so he dropped the hyphen and lowered the “J”. We had a good old chinwag after which we said our goodbyes. He and his wife will be flying back to SA on Saturday. What are the odds that we’ll see them there when we pick up our rental? After today, I’m a betting man!

 

We probably spent too much time on Level 2 enjoying those majestic masterpieces. We might not have noticed it but we were fast running out of time. And then, contrary to the advice from the ticket lady, we went up to Level 3 rather than down to Level 2, but, the two separate wings on the third floor were well worth the visit.

It was now 15:30 and our feet were starting to hurt from standing around doing nothing material. A whiff of coffee made us salivate so we followed the scent. To our dismay the barista was just shutting down his coffee machines for the day, but he pointed us to the Rijksmuseums’ restaurant on Level 0, and what a lovely place this turned out to be.

 

 

 

 

We ordered cappuccinos and a cheesecake with fresh cream to share. Man, were these great! Even the service and the wifi were great, we settled in for the long term. And this was where we realized the error in our ways. An announcement was made in Dutch that we understood but hoped that we didn’t. The English announcement confirmed that we understood the Dutch one 100% correctly. It was now 16:30 and the museum closes at 17:00, so people needed to start making an effort to leave. What!? We’ve been there for five hours but it felt as if we had only just arrived, we still had so much to see.

We paid up and rushed out of there; we simply had to see the first floor’s masterpieces from the 18th and 19th century, even if it was just a Van Gogh and a Goya. We rushed into the one wing and saw a few Troost works and then, realizing we were in the wrong wing for Van Gogh, we rush over there and found Van Gogh in all his glory. Okay, now the doors could close. But we rushed around some more and finally found a Goya, our day was complete. The doors started closing.

The Rijksmuseum is simply stunning. Having raved about the Louvre a few weeks back you may ask which one is best, but that would be an unfair question. The Rijksmuseum is large and amazing, the Louvre is huge and amazing, the one is not better than the other, they are different, you simply have to visit both.

In hindsight, like at the Louvre a few weeks back, there are a couple of things we’d do differently when visiting the Rijksmuseum next time. We’d be there at opening time at 09:00 to start this wonderful journey and also get an audio guide to guide us on our way. We would start at level 2, then proceed to Level 1, then 0 and finally finish with Level 3. We would also make sure that we schedule a long and relaxing lunch at the lovely Rijksmuseum restaurant. Ah, I can’t wait.

After the doors closed behind us we left the building but were met by a deluge of rain. We had not prepared for this, pity, by now we should have known better. Be as it may, we snuck back into the museum grounds and browsed through the onsite shop that sells all manner of things like coffee mugs, note pads, postcards, aprons, etc., all decked out with Van Meer, Van Gogh and what not.

And staying on the topic of art, just yesterday I stumbled upon an article, quite out of the blue, which mentioned that comedian/actor Jim Carrey had totally vanished from the scene, but they pointed to a video showing Jim as quite the experimental artist. For some reason I quite enjoyed watching this video.

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