February 19: Museum Day

I got up at 8:30 and headed down for breakfast. The prince and princess were still asleep. I enjoyed a great hostel breakfast and talked to some of the travelers in the breakfast area. I headed upstairs and roused Eric and Kate from their slumber so that they could get some of the free hostel eats before the breakfast room closed down. They ate and showered and we were out the door at noon. Today I wanted to go visit the Van Gogh Museum.

We headed out and shopped our way to the Van Gogh museum where we decided that the 15 Euro admission was a but steep so we went to the 11 Euro Rijksmuseum instead. After waiting in a line that was surprisingly long for noon on a February weekday we made it inside. I love looking at art that was painted by people that I can definitively say had crazy amounts of skill. The Rijksmuseum is full of Dutch master paintings and historical furniture that is all crafted with a level of workmanship that I can hardly fathom. I decided to separate from the group to take it all in to the best of my ability. I enjoyed the still life paintings the most. There is paintings of sculptures that when viewed from a distance literally look like sculptures not paintings and paintings of silverware that look better then actually looking at silverware for some reason. Anyways I was enjoying myself. Kate and Eric took off after an hour to grab some food but I stuck around and ogled the ivory inlayed into Ebony on a huge armoire in the museum for a while before looking again at the “Night Watch” for half an hour. It was a good time.

I met up with Kate and Eric and we headed off to Kate’s choice of museum, the Anne Frank house. We showed up, stood in line for a while and entered the truly emotional museum dedicated to the memory of the Frank family’s WWII hideaway. There was even the original Anne Frank diary. After this museum we headed back to the hostel to get fancied up for Eric’s birthday dinner.

We decided on a place called Humphrey’s. A three-course meal was 22.50 Euro, expensive, but the parental-units paid for this one so it was all right. The dinner was fantastic, I had mussels followed by chicken with Asian sauce on a bed of udon noodles and finished with spicy rum covered bananas and ice cream. I accompanied this with a Dutch beer. Sublime. We were all quite tired after dinner so we hit the hay.