Category: Netherlands, Spring 2023

After Amsterdam, we knew we wouldn’t want to stay in another large city right away.  Rather than stay in The Hague or Rotterdam, we opted to stay in a town between the two of them, Delft.  We stayed in an excellent spot called Hotel Arsenaal, a historic building that is listed as a National Monument.  Built in 1601, this site is a former arsenal that was filled with cannons, firearms, ammo and other weapons.  It also acted as a jail for Dutch collaborators of the Nazi’s, as well as an Army Museum, before it became the beautiful hotel it is today.

After checking in we headed to the Market Square, the center of the Delft.  There are two historic Protestant churches in town, the Old Church, and the New Church.  The names are a bit of a misnomer, as the New Church was completed in 1496.  First we visited the New Church, shown in the photo below.

You can walk up to the top of the tower on days with decent weather, so we got lucky.  The tower had been closed the two days prior due to rain and wind.  This is the second tallest church tower in the Netherlands, at 356 feet tall.  It’s 376 steps on a very narrow circular staircase to the viewing platform.  Despite banging my head on a very low beam and getting a bit dizzy from how tight the staircase is, the view from the top is excellent!  That’s the Market Square and City Hall below.

The Hague is in the distance, just a 20 minute train ride away.

To the southeast, Rotterdam is on the horizon,  a 30 minute train ride away.

The “Old” Church is below, founded in 1246, and on the site of previous churches dating back two centuries earlier.  Old=1246, New=1496.  It’s like the Dutch have a sense of humor!

The New Church is home to the tomb of William of Orange, one of the most important historical figures of the Netherlands.  Also known as William the Silent, he was the leader of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish that set off the 80 Years War in 1568, which resulted in the formal independence of the Netherlands in 1648.  The Dutch also refer to him as the Father of the Fatherland.  This guy has a lot of nicknames!  We loved that the tomb included his beloved dog, laying at his feet.

One corner of the tomb has a statue holding the “Hat of Liberty”, that looks suspiciously like a cowboy hat?

Something I really liked in both churches was that they had various information boards spread throughout the church, that gave the history and explained a lot about the individual church characteristics and personalities.  We’ve been in a lot of churches in Europe where you really don’t get much in the way of info, so this was nice.

Delft experienced a huge explosion of a gunpowder storehouse in 1654, that destroyed a large part of the city, and blew out most of the church’s stained glass windows.  For this reason a lot of the windows were initially replaced with just plain glass.  Over the years they have slowly been changing out the windows with newer stained glass.

The New Church has one of the more impressive stained glass windows we’ve seen.  This one is actually “new”,  dating from 2006.  The abstract shapes make out Jesus’ hands, a girls head turning toward the light, and a butterfly.  Ya gotta squint, turn your head sideways, and drink a bottle of wine…then it will be clear… that you had too much wine.

The exterior of the New Church.  The viewing platform near the top is just below the clock face.

Just outside the New Church is The Blue Heart, a piece of art meant to commemorate what Delft is best known for, Delft Blue pottery.

The Old Church is famous for having the tomb of one of the Netherlands most famous artists, Johannes Vermeer, who was born and raised in Delft.

The Old Church has a spectacular organ, that doesn’t look very “old”.

The tower of the Old Church is leaning about 6 feet towards the west, but has fortunately been shored up so it shouldn’t lean any further.  We’ve seen a lot of leaning buildings in the Netherlands!

No trip to Delft would be complete without visiting the last surviving Delft Blue factory, Royal Delft.  Royal Delft has been in business since 1653.

Porcelain plates from China were brought to the Netherlands by the Dutch East India Company in the early 1600’s, and were extremely popular.  The supply from China started to disappear around 1620 with the end of the Ming dynasty, so many in the Netherlands started to make their own pottery to fill the demand.  They tried to duplicate the patterns and designs from China, as evidenced by the two plates below (China on the left, Delft Blue on the right).

You can see artists at work during the factory tour.  The ink is immediately absorbed into the pottery, so any mistake cannot be undone.  Way too much pressure for me!!

It’s not just pottery, but tile as well.  This is an actual size Delft Blue recreation of  Rembrandt’s The Night Watch,  housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  It’s pretty damned impressive!

They even make items for decorating buildings.  This display reminded us of Gaudi!  Very cool.

The last visit we made in Delft was to the Guild of St. Luke.  Here they have exact scale replicas of every Vermeer painting.  I’m just going to post my favorite one, View of Delft, painted in 1659-1661.  This was shortly after the 1654 explosion, and many parts of the city were still in ruins, but Vermeer decided to depict it the way he wanted it to appear.

One last shot of Delft.

If we were to come back to the Netherlands, Delft would definitely be on the list.  A very cool little town!  Up next,  a visit to The Hague.

If you are planning a trip to Amsterdam make sure you book some of your visits well in advance. The Anne Frank House needs the most attention, as the bookings start two months out, and fill up quickly. The Van Gogh Museum comes up next, but you likely only need to book this out a week or two before arrival. The Rijksmuseum seems to be the easiest to get into, but I’d still book it a week out just to be on the safe side, and to lock in your desired time slot.
Our first stop was the Van Gogh Museum, which has the largest collection of Van Gogh’s in the world. There are 200 paintings, 400 drawings, and 700 letters by the artist.

One of the first paintings you run across is one of his famous “Sunflowers”. He produced five of these paintings, and this is one of two he gifted to his artist friend Paul Gaugin, painted in January 1889.

There were people taking photos of EVERY painting in the museum. Multiple photos. I took five. Below is one of those. These three paintings represent a “triptych”, which means that three works are combined to create one harmonious whole. Van Gogh was familiar with this style due to Japanese prints he admired. These three works, from left to right, are “The Pink Orchard”, “The Pink Peach Tree”, and “The White Orchard”. All of these were painted in Arles, France in April-May 1888.

The below is “Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat”, painted in September-October 1887. Van Gogh did a lot of self-portraits, not because he was obsessed with himself like a Kardashian, but because he couldn’t afford to pay a model to paint. Every self-portrait he produced was for experimentation with technique, colors and style. It’s interesting that Van Gogh was never famous during his life…admired by fellow painters and a few collectors, but fame didn’t come until well after his death.

The next painting is Irises, painted in May 1890. He painted this in the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Remy, where he was admitted after cutting off his own ear while in a manic state. I just can’t imagine cutting my own ear off…that takes some doing!  For Van Gogh, this painting was mainly a study in color.  After the ear incident I’m surprised he didn’t work with more reds!

This last one was new to me. I’m actually shocked to have not seen it before, as it was my favorite in the entire museum! This is Landscape at Twilight, painted in June 1890. I see a puzzle in my future!

The next day we visited the Anne Frank House (also known as The Annex), where the Frank family hid from the Nazi’s from July 1942 until their discovery on August 4th, 1944.  Below is a night shot of the front entrance to the museum.  We had reservations early in the morning hoping to avoid the crowds, but The Annex is so small that it’s always going to be crowded inside.

You can get an extra educational experience with a half hour history lesson about WWII, The Annex, and how the Frank Family came to be there.  The below was the only photo I was allowed to take inside.  I’ll post a couple of online photos that show what it looks like within The Annex.

The below image shows the entrance to The Annex, located behind the hinged bookcase.  The bookcase you can see inside is the original, covered in plexiglass to avoid damage from some idiot scrawling their name on it.

The below shows the main dining area as it was while the Franks were hiding here.

Here is what it looks like on the tour.  The only sign that it was the kitchen/dining area is the original counter and sink.

This is Anne Frank’s room as it looked during 1942-1944.

Here it is on the tour.  Yeah, just a tad crowded.

The first movie to chronicle their time in hiding was The Diary of Anne Frank, released in 1959.  Shelley Winters won an Oscar for her portrayal Mrs. Van Daan, Anne’s fictionalized name for Auguste Van Pels.  The Van Pels shared the hiding space with the Franks.  Shelley was nice enough to donate her Oscar to the museum.

This is the entrance to the house.  We walked back by after dinner the next night since it was so crowded during the daytime.

A full view of the house’s exterior.

The beautiful view right across the street.

Our last day in Amsterdam we visited the Rijksmuseum, housed in a gorgeous building.

The painting to see here is Rembrandt’s Night Watch.  It’s completely enclosed in it’s own specially designed glass chamber while the painting undergoes research to determine how vibrations effect the canvas, and so that the museum can determine the best way to remove the old protective varnish from the surface without damaging the paint.  The painting is huge, more than 12′ by 14′ in size.

There is yet another Van Gogh self-portrait here.  He painted this one shortly after all his teeth were removed.  Man, this dude had a rough life!

This was the coolest thing I saw in the entire museum, a contraption called the “Table Orrery” that could show the relative positions of the sun, earth, moon and planets…that dates from 1802!!

Our attempt at a selfie outside the museum.

We did do a canal tour, but there was really no “tour”, just an hour of telling jokes and drinking crappy wine and cheese.  Our hotel offered a private tour, and we should have taken them up on it.  You get what you pay for!

One last shot of Amsterdam to leave on a high note.

Up next we head to the little city of Delft, known for their blue ceramics.  Also known for their excellent location between The Hague and Rotterdam.