"Well okay then, well let's go explore our cultural identities."

The last two days have been ever so pleasant. Actually they were great!

On Friday we went to the De Hoge Veluwe National Park and the Kroller-Muller Museum. I think it was my favorite thing in the Netherlands so far. It was definitely near the top. As I understand it, there was a rich Dutch couple. He loved hunting and she loved art. So they have an art museum in a national park. Apparently they wanted to bring together culture and nature for the common good. I think they did a pretty good job. The park was really interesting with forests, areas that looked like prairie and drift sand dunes. There is also lots of wildlife. At each entrance and around the park are white bikes. You just pick one your size and use it. So after we entered the park, we got bikes and biked for about a half hour in the park until we reached the Museum. The museum was awesome. As a building, it was perfectly situated in nature and was definitely the best contemporary/modern art museum I have been to. I heard it has more Van Goghs than the Van Gogh museum. A lot of the art was from the beginning of the 20th century which was really great to see all together. There was one collection, that was actually quite different from the others, that I have to mention but not necessarily because it was my favorite. It was called “The Place To Be.” A great name I know. It was suppose to be about exploring cultural identities and a whole lot of other really complicated, overly explained, stuff. My favorite work from that collection was a piece of paper clipped to the wall. After the museum, we explored the sculpture garden which was huge and fabulous. Some of the sculptures were enormous and stood out while others looked almost like they were meant to be part of nature. Again, the collection of sculptures was really cool. I was going to try to describe my favorite but I can’t really because there were so many interesting and different ones. Later, we bikes around the park before heading back to the gate. Before getting the bus back to the train we also stopped a local bakery. There I got the best muffin ever.

Once back in Amsterdam, we met up with others and finally ate at the Café that is under the “our windmill” which is the windmill a block from where we live. It was a nice evening with people sitting outside and along the canal. The inside of the restaurant was surprisingly really cute/suave for being beneath a windmill. I also got a goat cheese pear salad which was also wonderful. So yeah, in conclusion, yesterday was a good day. No, a great day.

It’s like Disneyland…of Tulips

During J-term, I was flipping channels and saw these beautiful gardens. I decided to watch a little bit and on the screen flashed “Lisse, The Netherlands.” I then decided that I had to go to Lisse and today we did. To be specific we went to the Keukenhof Flower Gardens. What this means is that we saw TULIPS. Actually, we saw over 7 million flowers today and I only took pictures of about 6 million.

The bad thing about these gardens was that they are only open for 8 weeks which means that over 100,000 people visit them a week. This means that everything took a long time. We waited at the tourist office to get discount tickets and then we had to take the tram, then wait for bus, cram on to it, get off, wait for another bus or actually three more buses, finally cram on, and then get to the park. Besides this, however, I really liked the park.

When we walked through the gates of the garden I immediately felt the excitement of disneyworld or an amusement park. That is probably because the first thing we saw were hoards of tourists, a giant foundation, souvenir shops, an over priced cafe and a giant thing playing carousel music. As we ate lunch outside, the carousel music started playing something magical. By magical I mean the song that always plays whenever Gob is doing magic on Arrested Development. That made everything a bit sunnier and it actually did get sunnier as the day went on. After making it past this fairly ridiculous area, however, the park was beautiful. I took about 200 pictures today but at one point I just had to restrain myself. There was one part in particular which was so pleasant. There were huge old trees lining and shading the pathways, a pond and fountain, and throughout flowers beds filled with brilliantly colored flowers. I imagined what it would be like to get there as the sun was rising in the morning, and wander along the long paths in the peace. I tried several times to take a picture of the rows of flowers and the way they sat together but there was really no way to get it all in a picture. Apparently it is also the largest sculpture park in the Netherlands. By the way, the whole park was bordered by the famous fields of tulips. Oh, also at some point we decided to take senior pictures and pictures of each of us jumping. I was the senior picture photographer and it was pretty fun posing everyone and being ridiculous. I should also say that I guess the theme of the garden this year was the Beijing Olympic Games which explains the random Asian things throughout. As we were leaving these people in inflated costumes that I think were of the official character/animal/creatures of the Olympics were walking around. I was totally waiting for them to get attacked or beaten up but it never happened.

So that is how the last couple of days have been ever so pleasant. Happy Passover! Oh, Moses…