Holland was once the home of Rembrandt and Van Gogh, so the museums here are great. We spent the morning at the Rijks Museum.
This museum’s claim to fame is a Rembrandt titled “The Night Watch”. It took my breath away. It’s huge…….the figures are life size. Beautiful!!
The lighting in the room made it hard to take a clear pic, but i did the best i could.
We saw lots of kids in tour groups today. They would sit in front of the different paintings with sketchbooks and draw.
A few other really nice pieces of art
One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about this city is people watching and listening. Wherever we’ve been, on the trams around town or just walking around, people are speaking different languages. Besides Dutch, I’ve heard French, Italian, Russian and German to name a few. That being said, almost everyone also speaks English. We just turned on the tv for the first time and I am laughing. Many Dutch channels, but also US choices. I am watching Comedy Central where the audio is in English and it has Dutch subtitles. Funny!
Oh, and I found this funny. The toilets here do not have tanks or flush handles. The bowl is mounted to the wall and there are big round buttons on the wall to push when you are finished. Weird.
The weather has been cold and windy. A little bit of drizzle this morning, but not much rain at all, which is much better than the forecast said. Obviously its not quite spring yet here, but right across the street from our hotel is a little patch of tulip seedlings. I bet they will be gorgeous in a few weeks.
