Today we visited 3 museums.
The weather wasn’t great as we started our day, but having parked at the Arena we took the tram to central station and, after a bit of searching, we then took the bus to the National Maritime Museum. Like all the other museums we have visited we could have spent all week there!
As you arrive at the museum there are two things that strike you: the trading ship moored outside and, across the bay, the building that looks like a sinking oil tanker. Forget the sinking oil tanker, that’s nothing to do with today’s visits, that’s the science museum!
We did a fairly extensive tour of the trading ship which was mildly educational. This ship is a model of a typical ship belonging to the Dutch West Indies Company. Then, across the jetty, we went to admire the Royal Barge (the real thing this time, not just a mock up).
After that we went into the museum proper to look at two exhibitions. We saw many drawings and paintings which educated us a little about the very impressive Dutch naval history (we’ll spare you the details!)
We then moved on to an exhibition about Dutch mapmaking through history, where we learned how influential the Dutch really were in maritime history.
Having seen only about 20% of what the museum has to offer, it was already time to break for a picnic lunch.
Sadly we then had to move on to our next destination: the church in the attic.
In fact that’s a bit of a misnomer. Back in the day (I’m hopeless at remembering dates) the Protestants took over and all the Catholic churches were converted. Catholicism was more or less outlawed. However, it was tolerated providing that it was kept private. As a result a number of “house churches” appeared. These were churches that were built inside a house. In the house that we visited, the first, second and third floors were used to construct a hidden church.
But there was a lot more to it than just seeing a hidden church. We also saw the living accommodation and got some idea of how people lived at that time.
After seeing the hidden church we then walked through the town to find our next museum which was to tell us the story of the development of the canals of Amsterdam.
This walk took us through an Amsterdam different from the one we had seen up to now. Almost every café was advertising “smoke & drinks”. We were also intrigued to pass a “condomerie” (whatever that is!)
Having successfully run the gauntlet of the seedier side of Amsterdam we finally arrived at our destination: the canal museum.
Here we learned some of the history of the development of the canals; how the town planners decided on what to build where, and then how the building was actually achieved.
p.s. Sue took 125 photos today. We decided not to include them all!