Amsterdam, a city for all seasons...

I am one of those fortunate people who happens to have close family living in Amsterdam in Holland. That's an excellent excuse to visit the city half a dozen times a year. Amsterdam is one of these places, like only a handful of them on the planet, that after you've been there once, you wanna keep coming back. A city of thousand years history where old meets new in the coziest sort of way. The city boils with life. The traditional love of the Dutch for saturated colors makes it extremely lively. A photographer's paradise. Yellows, and reds and greens and blues! The Dutch love to paint their houses and dress equally in the most conspicuous colors one can think of. Such color brilliance and saturation can traumatize us from the south for life, as we have been raised in the conservative catholic christian couleur locale of the dullest gray to remind us of our daily portion of drizzling rain.

Amsterdam was the capital of the hippy baby boomers of the sixties, but as you walk thru the Dam square nowadays, at the city center, it feels like time has stopped and the flower dressed peace-lovers never left the square. As you walk in the narrow streets everywhere in town you sense the scent of soft drugs, coming from any of about 70 coffee shops where you can easily get served more than just a 'coffee'. The scent of joints will tell you that this is Amsterdam, if one dropped you blindfolded in the middle of the town in the darkest night and you tried to figure out where you were.

The city is packed with musea and art galleries for history and art lovers and you suddenly feel like you walk in the streets of Venice. Water canals are everywhere and you soon get lost thinking you are still moving along the Keizersgracht whereas your steps have already brought you to the Lijnbaansgracht in the opposite radial direction that you thought you were walking towards (happened to me...).

I love looking at and shooting them typically Dutch bridges (see right, I named them after Van Gogh as the painter used to paint them). You can find them everywhere. You can also find canal boats of all sorts and colors turned into floating homes and decorated like real houses with green and flowers. Oh yes... Dutch flowers. Most of us know the tulips, but the word 'Dutch' must be actually a synonym for flowers. The Dutch love flowers to their heart for centuries now, to such a degree that I believe they could have even invented them if there weren't any. Anyways, they make a lot of money too, by trading them, as much as enjoying their colors and scent!

Amsterdam is a city for pedestrians and bikers. You'd be a fool to drive here - yep, I am one foolish basterd like that- as their extremely narrow streets are usually packed with pedestrians and bikers and public transport vehicles, especially trams. Parking spaces are convenient and easy to find but will cost you a small fortune for a few days stay. So, leave your vehicle in your home-garage and get here by any transport means other than by your car, trust me. I almost drove over a bleeding biker woman who decided to cross over the pedestrians' pathway on a red traffic light... She 'whispered' sorry, but I almost got a stroke thinking I'd spend the rest of my weekend in hospitals caring for the cow and at the local police station doing the explaining, dammit! I quickly parked in the hotel garage after the incident and put my legs to some use instead. Good for one's condition too. BTW, as a pedestrian, keep a good watch for aggressive bikers and tram drivers. They are all ready to commit traffic crimes and walk away from the scene like nothing did happen. Don't come to tell me later that I didn't warn you...

We visited the Hermitage this time. This used to be an old people resting house at the crossing of the Amstel river and the New Herengracht canal, turned into a convenient museum venue. Probably the old ones being cared in there have passed away in the meantime, who knows? I don't know the actual story behind the Amsterdam Hermitage really. Rita does, as she saw a related documentary on TV. Anyways, it said Hermitage on its front brick wall and it's apparently connected somehow with the real Hermitage at St-Petersburg in Russia. The exhibits come from there and the word goes that they regularly refresh them with new ones that arrive from the mother-ship. I gotta be honest, I left the place with mixed feelings (btw, the joke will cost you 15 euros a person in entrance fees, do the math if there's two of you). The exhibits themselves were rather outstanding samples of superior human craftsmanship but not of any form of real art. These were the possessions of the ruling aristocracy in the tsars' Russia, that immense Empire in the North-East, before the Bolsheviks decided to cut the abuse short. Most paintings date from the nineteenth century and have rather historical than artistic value. You could see plenty of fat army bastards posing to their portraits with plenty of decorations shining on their proud chest! Most works were well painted in a realism artistic movement, but some were plain ugly and badly done. The highest the rank of the portrayed subject the more skilled (and probably expensive) the painter. In fact, there were a few smaller size paintings in which the artists kinda felt like they actually challenged to a duel the most famous of the Flemish so-called primitives of the 15th century. Some brush strokes were thinner than a fraction of a millimeter! Those painters must have had some real strong vision and/or used big time magnifying glasses to do them. Remarkable.

There were similar works of outstanding craftsmanship witnessed in the remaining exhibits as well, to the extent that I felt quite disgusted by the arrogance of the rich while the masses were starving to death from hunger and illnesses. Although I have never supported socialist regimes and systems during any part of my adult life, seeing the Hermitage in A'dam made me feel like the Reds were right to defeat the riches and call it a day. Big time! Also, kudos to the early communist leaders for having protected those treasures of human craftsmanship from the Bolshevik mob in the aftermath of the October Revolution, for us in the future generations to witness. Only thing I really hoped for and couldn't find in that same exhibition were any good samples of Russian iconography, of any of their Masters, like Rublev or the workshop of the Stroganoffs. I guess, one has to visit the mother-ship in Leningrad for more and better samples.

All in all, the Hermitage is worth the visit, if you are like my spouse, very fond of anything costume Victorian style fiction literature, Jane Austin and the like, with loads of romantic virgins and horny imperial officers and ball dresses in palaces with the virgins falling in love with them useless army captains. What a pile of crap... As for me, I don't know. I'd have preferred the Rijksmuseum packed with outstanding works of 'real art' from Dutch Masters of the likes of Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. But that's for my next visit to town...

If you don't mind seeing my shooting samples with my Nikon P6000 during the weekend, check this out. You'll witness how the city looked like just yesterday...