Day 2 "Recovery"

Breakfast and ADVENTURE

Today you're getting Jessi (with some slight edits from Josh)! Well ... at least for a while! Our itinerary for the day involved "jet lag recovery" .... you know, a lazy day to sleep in, drink some coffee, explore the city, maybe find a museum or something, and just generally explore Amsterdam by foot. Well ... if you know anything about Team Huffowicz, you know that this "so-called recovery day" turned into a 12 mile adventure of epic proportions!

We had good food and coffee. We saw canals and dykes and windmills. SO MANY BIKES. There are SO MANY BIKES IN AMSTERDAM! It seems like everyone here bikes - kids, hipsters, working professionals in suits, tourists .... everyone...EVERYONE! The infrastructure is so cool - and really set up to handle it! But... I'm getting ahead of myself. 

We did the "sleep in part" relatively well, waking at about 7 a.m. local time and being ready to hit the road by about 9 a.m. We took a bus from our Air B&B into Central Station and started a nice long wander around the city. We found coffee near the train station and took our drinks to-go so we could start our wandering. We quickly found the city bustling with summer tourists. We decided to walk for a while to try and get out of the busiest central area before getting breakfast. Eventually, we came upon a cafe with gorgeous waffles in the window. I was hungry - and we decided to stop and eat some breakfast. GOOD DECISION! Chocolate waffle with a silky, sweet cream, fresh strawberries and walnuts ... my precious! I'm normally a "savory" breakfast fan, so it was a pretty big departure for me. Delicious. Josh was boring and stuck with a ham sandwich. 

The Palace:

Our wanderings also took us to Dam Square, the home of the Koninklijk Paleis Amsterdam (Royal Palace of Amsterdam), known as the 8th Wonder of the World, and the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church). We went on the self-guided audio tour of the Palace and it was fantastic. The Palace, as it turns out, was not originally intended as Palace, but as a Town Hall. It was super interesting looking at the ornate carvings on the palace walls. In particular, I took note of the number of women given permanent and prominent places in sculpture and design features. There are two women standing over the main doors by which tourists enter the Great Hall. One is the Maiden of Amsterdam, who looks down from her perch looking over three large atlases - keeping watch over the world. Above the Maiden is a gorgeous statue of the Goddess of Peace, holding an olive branch. AMAZING! ...ok Here's Josh...

Hello everyone! Echoing Jessi, the Royal Palace was indeed the Town Hall of Amsterdam UNTIL Amsterdam was taken over by France...yeah...I said FRANCE! Louis Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte's brother,  was made King Louis I by the Batavian republic, which was formed by a revolution in Amsterdam. Ole' Louis got eyes on the Town Hall and decided to move in and have it for his own house in 1806. I'm sure it was a real bummer for the people of Amsterdam, because historically the Town Hall was open to all people. The crowning jewel of the Town Hall (now Palace) is the great hall, featuring maps in the floor of marble and ivory. These maps were the known world at the time and the stars. They used these maps to track their ships. Besides that, all of the government offices. After King Louis moved in, that came to a halt. Shortly after Napoleon fell from power, it was returned to the Dutch as a Palace of the Netherlands and official state functions (state dinners, receptions, Royal Family stays, foreign heads of state stays) STILL take place in the hall. It's amazing because right now (for a small 10 EUR fee)...you can just walk through it! No crazy security, no excessive royal family protective service presence...just museum curators, and a few waist-high clear glass barriers to stay behind (not many).

It was super awesome to look through all the offices, turned bedrooms and witnessed the beautiful works of art in them! Once Rembrandt's largest painting was featured in the one of the wings, but the administrators at the time were not pleased with his depiction of the Batavian revolutionary figure in the painting. So it was cut out and now a piece of it sits in another museum! It was neat to see the the town bankruptcy office, now turned into a bedroom. In that same office, Rembrandt once stood to declare bankruptcy. Things were not going so well for him at the time. 

There a few very cool themes in the Palace's art and architecture: 1 The Universe (as interpreted by the Dutch) and 2 Day-to-day life and duties of civic employees and 3. Morality. The maps and the various selection of Greek/Roman Gods and Greek/Roman Tales described the view of their universe. The daily duties of civic employees were represented in sculptures above and around the doors to the offices, which performed those duties (and they were bitingly appropriate at times). Morality is an overlying feature throughout the Palace and many of the paintings contain descriptions underneath, which underly the virtues or vices they are meant to depict. For you German speakers out there, the place kind of seems like a Struwwel Peter BUILDING. There are stories of caution and example everywhere.

I suppose the coolest example of all three of the above themes that I can immediately think of is: The Bankruptcy office. The door to the office is festooned with locks and birdskulls around the door. A sculpture above the  door depicts the figure of Icarus falling from the sky, his wings in shambles around him. For those unfamiliar, Icarus is a figure in Greek mythology, who illustrates hubris, as he flew too close to the sun with his wax-bound wings against his father's warnings. Anyway, Over the Icarus statue is another statue of skulls, empty wallets, overturned chests (money chests) and rats. Inside though, there is a painting which depicts Theseus returning to Ariadne from the labyrinth with the head of the Minotaur and a ball of thread she gave him in order to help him find his way in the labyrinth. It symbolized that the city would guide a person on the way back from insolvency.

Ok last thing about the Palace. They have a room where the condemned are sentenced to death. In Amsterdam they never executed more than 4 people in a year. It was a VERY serious and grave thing to them, and they took it very very seriously. They condemned the criminal to death in a room full of sculptures representing death, repentance, and virtuous example. After that, they would go upstairs to a marble floored room, where the condemned would kneel on the floor. The sentencing officials would kneel on the floor with him, and pray for the redemption of his soul after death. After that, the condemned would walk out of the window onto a scaffold, facing Dam Square, where he/she would face their sentence. Such care and grace!

Walking Around Amsterdam

After we toured the palace for 2.5 hours, we thought it would be a lovely idea to go for a 10+ mile walk around the city. We weaved through the old city, stopping for coffee and water as we went. We crossed beautiful canal branches over amazing bridges. The city is a marvel of engineering. The whole city is built around a system of canals, which allow for the movement of people and goods around the city and beyond. Navigating the many channels and crossings was extremely difficult, but we found our way around ok I guess. We were trying to get lost from the more touristy-zones. We succeeded in some places. We found the only Windmill left in Amsterdam, the Ship Building Museum (with an actual old wooden ship docked there), the museum of Science,  and numerous amazingly serene and beautiful neighborhoods! The afternoon was worth EVERY step of the 25k we obtained today! The people of Amsterdam are amazingly polite and accommodating! We have had nothing but AMAZING experiences with the people of Amsterdam. 

We walked through the world famous Bloem Markt (Flower Market), where tulip bulbs are sold to all tourists who seek them.

We scouted the location of our hotel in Central Amsterdam, to which we are moving tomorrow (planned). The place we are staying at now, is not as close into the city as we wanted to be originally, BUT staying in central Amsterdam is EXPENSIVE. So had an AirBnB as a soft landing place for us when we got here. It's been really great to stay here in Nieuwendam (Amsterdam-Nord) and witness what life is like for normal Amsterdam residents. 

We caught dinner at a touristy steakhouse in the Damrak District, so named for the Dutch Stock Market. We had steaks and a few nice drinks, and wandered around the old city some more. We walked through De Wallen, the famous red-light district, while the sun was still out, so the prostitutes were all inside, doing their make-up? We took pictures of the Oude Kerk (Old Chirch) and Sint Niklaas Kerk (Basilica of Saint Nicholas) before we hopped on a bus for home. So here I am on our recovery day, writing this post at midnight....we are LOVING Amsterdam....we're going to need another "recovery" day tomorrow! LOVE IT! As the Dutch say, "Doie!" (bye!)