A Day at the Rijksmuseum

Today, Nick and I are going to tour the Rijksmusem in Amsterdam. This museum is one of the finest in the world and also one of my all time favorites as well.

I had considered coming to Europe earlier than the beginning of June because I had heard that the Rijksmuseum was having an amazing exhibit of Johannes Vermeer this year. The exhibit featured 28 of the 36 original Vermeer paintings the exist today (I am not completely sure on those numbers, but they are pretty close). The museum had assembled the collection by having most of the known Vermeer’s loaned to them for the duration of the exhibit. The exhibit ran from February through 3 June, 2023. I inquired about tickets, but the exhibit was completely sold out by the time I found out about it. So instead of coming to Europe in May, I ended up coming in early June instead to better align with Nick and Steve’s respective visits.

All was not lost however. The Rijksmuseum has a number of Vermeer’s as a part of their permanent collection, and had arranged to keep a few of the loaned paintings for a while longer. The most famous of the Vermeer paintings, The Girl with the Pearl Earring was only loaned to the museum until late March, so I was not going to be able to see that regardless, unless I would go to The Hague where the painting is originally from. Alas, this did not come to pass, but the Museum is always worth going to visit regardless of the loaned exhibits.

The most famous painting in the Rijksmuseum is the “Night Watch” by Rembrandt. I knew that this painting was restored, but I miss calculated since it was still being restored and not yet finished. So the painting was surrounded by scaffolding and machines and other equipment for the restoration effort, but still offered a view of this amazing work of art.

Even with the restoration equipment, the Night Watch is still pretty amazing. It takes up an entire wall it is so large.

Nick and I toured the entire museum before I realized that somehow, we missed the Vermeer’s! So we backtracked and found them. There were still six Vermeer’s that were either part of the Rijksmuseum permanent collection or still on loan from their home museum.

It was a fantastic day at the museum. Tomorrow, we would head for Belgium, but not before we checked off the last thing on our to-do list for Amsterdam. We had to visit the Red Light district! Only to visit though. We were not remotely in the market for anything they were selling. The Red Light district is the famous part of Amsterdam where the Ladies of the Night “advertise” their services in the windows of their “work places”. These ladies of the night actually work all hours of the night and day except for the mid morning. It turned out that we had a difficult time finding the exact location of the Red Light district. We searched quite a while before we found it and were a little disappointed after we did. We were there in the early evening and not many of the “ladies” were advertising. We did see a few, and more of the empty windows where they would be later that night, but we came away with a general idea of the goings-on there. Besides the ladies who were in the side alleys, it was a vibrant neighborhood with lots of restaurants and tourist shops (along with lots of sex shops too). It was all very interesting, a true part of Amsterdam worth the experience.

Belgium wasn’t on the original agenda. But, since Nick and I did not have a rigid schedule, we decided that it was possible to go to Belgium and still see the other things Nick wanted to see. And I wanted to go since I had never been to Belgium and I wanted to drink Belgian ales (my favorite!) IN BELGIUM.

We had the additional benefit of discovering Ghent! We had decided earlier that we did not want to go to Brussels, their capital, but rather go to a smaller city. I am not really sure how we chose Ghent, but I am glad we did since it was a very nice city. It had lots of old buildings including churches and a castle. It had a canal system too, but nothing to rival Amsterdam, but still very nice.

We really liked Ghent. We found a nice, convenient hotel right across from the rail station that made getting around pretty easy for us. It was about a 15-20 minute walk to the older, historical area of town. But as much as we liked it, it was time to move on. Tomorrow, we would invade Paris.