Despite our night out on Monday, the goal was to fit in a drive to the Netherlands Open Air Museum in Arnhem for the day. However, since the rain had sequestered us near the harbor, we hadn't gotten a chance to see the market that Alisa's coworker had recommended.
The front desk at the Hotel Bazaar had told us that breakfast started at 8 and could go all day. "Even until 1pm," they said. It was mentioned like it was included, but then we decided that maybe it wasn't when we were halfway through. The abundance was overwhelming, but also instilled some curiosity. I pulled up the receipt as we made cheese and tomato sandwiches, after the yogurt and honey. It was included, and we didn't know about our lunch plans, so we put the rest of the rolls in napkins and brought them along with us to drop off.
While Alisa was hopping upstairs to the creepy Frida Kahlo room, I chatted with the desk attendant about the weather for the upcoming King's Day. She was worried about the rain and its dampening effects. Given that no rainstorm has ever lasted more than ten minutes since we've been here, I'm thinking it'll be ok.
We walked past the restaurant we ate at last night to get to St. Lawrence's church, with a market starting to set up next to it, and the modernist construction of the market hall. Since Rotterdam was essentially flattened by the Nazis, it has had a big architectural revival. From the front steps of the Market Hall, we could see a row of "cube houses." However, instead of being square to the ground, they were balanced on a point. With custom furniture and well-used spaces (as well as some common areas to ease the squeeze), they are apparently surprisingly liveable. One is tourable, but we had other sights to see.
In the couple blocks between us and the cube houses was the library - another modern piece that had some pyramidal aspects. We headed along a bridge towards the water, hopping onto a hillside and getting down closer to the water after we realized we were on the path that puts pedestrians on the other side of the water.
We saw some house- (and party) boats. While crossing the harbor (in the correct direction), we glanced at the fleet that made up the maritime museum's collection. The floating walkway was moveable if anything needed to get in or out.
With our abbreviated tour of Rotterdam complete, it was time to hop back in the car for the drive to Arnhem. The hour or two continued the theme of flat - windmills along the way were the only noticeable landmarks. The brown signs that led us to the museum also led us to some forested area. Given that much of the land is reclaimed from the sea, there aren't a whole lot of forests in Holland.
We parked, then headed into the large, modern entrance structure. It had horizontal wood accents around the massive windows everywhere. I went down to the bathroom and came up to view - through those massive windows - the storm that had kicked up in the blink of an eye. It's my hypothesis that because the Netherlands are so flat, the weather moves really quickly.
The tiny hailstones convinced us to stay inside for a bit. Alisa grabbed an espresso, and, in the few minutes it took for the sleet to pass, we stared at the part of the park that we could see. Beyond a track that presumably circled the property with a tram was a trio of large fields. The first was empty, the second held a small windmill, the third a herd of sheep. Up on the hill connected (and one of the few hills we'd encountered) was a multi-storied windmill.
The rain and associated precipitation had abated, so we headed toward the tram. Alisa still was working on her cup, so the driver asked up to take the next train so she could finish. We instead headed off to the left and started browsing.
If you oriented the park as a clock around the vaguely circular tram track, we started at 6 and headed toward 8. The sun, of course, was shining on the small heaps of hail that had gathered under the trees.
The park had collected buildings from early farm dwellings and brought them into a very tight space, if you assume each was originally on an entire piece of land to support it.
Now, we could pop into one, see how the living quarters were connected to the barn (for efficient work and for economical heating) and then walk the thirty feet to the fancy house, that had a wall between the barn side and the house side of their dwelling.
We wandered amid the structures, happening upon some sheep, seeking out the clucking chickens with feather-covered feet, then surprising ourselves with the cows that were just shadows from the front room.
A demonstration, in Dutch, of the rope-making process was going on, and we watched a few tweens getting in on the action, twisting the strands to turn into a thicker and thicker piece of rope.
We finished up at the residential section, ending at this summer home of some government official... or maybe it was his childhood home? Regardless, a half-size floor connected to the master suite was clearly were you'd put a kid and fence them off. The rest of the house had some great 70s era modular design. It reminded me of the Frank Lloyd Wright summer house of the same era in Wisconsin - the thick-grained chair coverings, the wood drawers and paneling hiding toaster ovens and wine storage. Besides the fact that it seemed it had no insulation, it was a snapshot from the past that was still beautiful.
Past the residential and farming section was the commercial section. A pharmacy had been brought in, as well as a bakery that we had to peek into. The sun had staved off some of the chill, but when I walked through the shade, I couldn't believe it was spring.
The smell wafting over the single "street" (still pedestrian) we had was clearly leading to the bakery. A brick oven in the back also tempted up with its heat. The burning of the logs was so regular that it looked artificial. I'm still questioning whether it was real.
We each picked a bun. Our first idea was to continue walking, but a cloudburst had us instead contemplating the oven and the culinary supplies one could buy instead of traversing the temporarily ill weather.
While the "storm" paused to catch its breath, we skipped to the next building down the lane, a house with Oriental ornamentation. After the slight pause, the chill and wet was reinvigorated, and we ducked in to the general store, selling postcard, knickknacks, and bags of chocolate. A selection of wafer-thin dark and milk chocolate "feathers" was acquired.
Alisa, as the youngest in her family, has a taste for licorice. I've heard the theory that older siblings get all the good jelly beans, and so, as a coping mechanism, the youngest begin to prefer the rejects - aka the licorice jelly beans. Now, the Netherlands has licorice everywhere. Is it just the butt of all jokes in Europe, so it had to acquire a taste for it?
I was saving my sweet tooth (though I didn't know it at the time) for an old-timey stand that was selling poffertjes. I'd read about these little pancake pods, but this was the first opportunity (thought certainly not the last) to try them. Alisa went with some cheese; I had chocolate. In the future, we would only ever have them with powdered sugar, which is the right move.
They are cooked in these large metal pans with dips in even rows. The little holes are filled with batter from a funnel with a handle the controls the drips out the bottom, then they rise a bit as they are baking and are flipped with a fork, making them into little 3-D pods of pancake batter.
The sun was shining as we left (and I was warmed from the inside with the hot cocoa I had ordered), so I felt extra daring to try a bicycle with the pedals directly attached to the wheel, like a unicycle. It was shockingly difficult to have no way to just glide as the top of your foot went over the wheel. Building up a bit of speed helped, but then I had to be sure to dodge the kids that were both adept and not on the bikes and on these little wheeled vehicles where the kid would "row" the wheels to get it going.
We had felt very welcome in all of the little houses we had explored, so when the next one had a line of wooden shoes against the wall, I popped off my rain boot to try one. An in-costume employee came around the corner and immediately started scolding me. Apparently these shoes were antique or authentic - not to be worn. She did then offer up her own wooden shoes (not antique) for me to try! I couldn't say no... and so, while I had them on, weirdly warm from her feet, she described the one of the tricks is very thick socks. The other trick was to get ones that fit well; these were too large for me, so I clunked around for a few steps before returning them.
Alisa and I visited another house, this time one frozen in time from when it was renovated in the 2000s. The original house was older, but the renovations made it the one that Alisa and I wanted to own. It was a politician's house, so had some historical significance as well.
The little railroad circled the property, and we were one stop away from where we wanted to do next - a cheese house. The closest stop was at a rail station that had been moved there, so it was appropriate to jump on the little tram on a rail.
While we were one stop away, the tram only went one direction - counter-clockwise. We were one stop away clockwise. So we settled in to watch out the window during the 10-minute journey around the park.
I was excited for the cheese-making plant because the brochure had mentioned samples. We skimmed the information about creating cheese at scale, with steam-powered machines, and peeked in every room - no samples today.
We decided to head back toward the entrance, which meant we still saw a Victorian garden with children's activities, another half dozen cute houses, a windmill at the top of the fields that we saw from the entrance that we climbed up, a 1970s modular house with a video in binoculars showing it in use, and some heirloom sheep and goats.
We weren't sure if the Kröller-Müller Museum was going to happen, since the Open Air Museum was so big, but there were still two hours until the museum closed. The open air museum wasn't far from the park that the museum was in, but once we got there, it was another mile into the park (and we had to pay to bring the car) to get to the museum. If we had been there earlier, we could have ridden on the free bikes provided. We were a little pressed for time, so spent the money.
The Kröller-Müller Museum has something like the second largest collection of Van Goghs in the world. It had the progressions from his early days, where he was learning to paint, to when he started experimenting with his pointillistic style. Which, by the way, is a pretty cool way to paint. Not only did it have Van Goghs, it had his compatriots, so we could see how the mood of the art scene influenced him. There were probably at least thirty works on display by Van Gogh, though, with a cool timeline of when Helene Kröller-Müller bought them, with help from her art brokerse. She had this crazy unlimited budget, so much so that she paid five times what someone was offering for a Van Gogh because she and her broker thought it was worth that much. Maybe there's some strategy that would allow it to appreciate faster in her collection if she paid more for it, but she clearly wasn't getting these as monetary investments - she was getting them to truly capture an artist that she admired.
We visited the sculpture garden out back, which included at least one Rodin. A large-scale "statue" was essentially this skatepark-like floor that was painted black and white, so entering it was like entering an alien, cartoonish landscape. Alisa got targeted by a photographer who liked her white sunglasses and black outfit, which coordinated with the park. There was head tilts to get the art to reflect in her sunglasses, then we got his Instagram handle to check it out later.
The museum was under quite a bit of renovation, so our short time worked out fine. As we were leaving the park, we saw a bunch of cars pulled over. I peeked over as we drove by, and a herd of deer were grazing. The Netherlands don't have a lot of wildlife, apparently.
It was our first evening driving during rush hour, and, despite all the bikes around, there was still plenty of traffic. We eventually got into Utrecht, parked in the designated parking garage a few blocks away, then relaxed for a bit. Utrecht is known for its double-decker canals, so we found the ones right behind our hotel and walked along them, looking for dinner. A burger place called Pickles (which, many reviewers mentioned, didn't have any pickles) had a veggie burger for Alisa, so we popped in. Dinner was very slow, but we weren't in a hurry - until it took half an hour to get our food, after taking fifteen minutes to order, and we were just getting hungry. From an analysis of all the knives and forks being used on the burgers, we were probably being gauche, but I was hungry after all that!
As a treat, and because it was chilly out, we had some ice cream from a stand that was halfway on the bridge over a canal. It was a brisk walk for the last two blocks back, with a chilly bowl in my hand, but finding stracciatella was what I wanted!
I was saving my sweet tooth (though I didn't know it at the time) for an old-timey stand that was selling poffertjes. I'd read about these little pancake pods, but this was the first opportunity (thought certainly not the last) to try them. Alisa went with some cheese; I had chocolate. In the future, we would only ever have them with powdered sugar, which is the right move.
They are cooked in these large metal pans with dips in even rows. The little holes are filled with batter from a funnel with a handle the controls the drips out the bottom, then they rise a bit as they are baking and are flipped with a fork, making them into little 3-D pods of pancake batter.
The sun was shining as we left (and I was warmed from the inside with the hot cocoa I had ordered), so I felt extra daring to try a bicycle with the pedals directly attached to the wheel, like a unicycle. It was shockingly difficult to have no way to just glide as the top of your foot went over the wheel. Building up a bit of speed helped, but then I had to be sure to dodge the kids that were both adept and not on the bikes and on these little wheeled vehicles where the kid would "row" the wheels to get it going.
We had felt very welcome in all of the little houses we had explored, so when the next one had a line of wooden shoes against the wall, I popped off my rain boot to try one. An in-costume employee came around the corner and immediately started scolding me. Apparently these shoes were antique or authentic - not to be worn. She did then offer up her own wooden shoes (not antique) for me to try! I couldn't say no... and so, while I had them on, weirdly warm from her feet, she described the one of the tricks is very thick socks. The other trick was to get ones that fit well; these were too large for me, so I clunked around for a few steps before returning them.
Alisa and I visited another house, this time one frozen in time from when it was renovated in the 2000s. The original house was older, but the renovations made it the one that Alisa and I wanted to own. It was a politician's house, so had some historical significance as well.
The little railroad circled the property, and we were one stop away from where we wanted to do next - a cheese house. The closest stop was at a rail station that had been moved there, so it was appropriate to jump on the little tram on a rail.
While we were one stop away, the tram only went one direction - counter-clockwise. We were one stop away clockwise. So we settled in to watch out the window during the 10-minute journey around the park.
I was excited for the cheese-making plant because the brochure had mentioned samples. We skimmed the information about creating cheese at scale, with steam-powered machines, and peeked in every room - no samples today.
We decided to head back toward the entrance, which meant we still saw a Victorian garden with children's activities, another half dozen cute houses, a windmill at the top of the fields that we saw from the entrance that we climbed up, a 1970s modular house with a video in binoculars showing it in use, and some heirloom sheep and goats.
We weren't sure if the Kröller-Müller Museum was going to happen, since the Open Air Museum was so big, but there were still two hours until the museum closed. The open air museum wasn't far from the park that the museum was in, but once we got there, it was another mile into the park (and we had to pay to bring the car) to get to the museum. If we had been there earlier, we could have ridden on the free bikes provided. We were a little pressed for time, so spent the money.
The Kröller-Müller Museum has something like the second largest collection of Van Goghs in the world. It had the progressions from his early days, where he was learning to paint, to when he started experimenting with his pointillistic style. Which, by the way, is a pretty cool way to paint. Not only did it have Van Goghs, it had his compatriots, so we could see how the mood of the art scene influenced him. There were probably at least thirty works on display by Van Gogh, though, with a cool timeline of when Helene Kröller-Müller bought them, with help from her art brokerse. She had this crazy unlimited budget, so much so that she paid five times what someone was offering for a Van Gogh because she and her broker thought it was worth that much. Maybe there's some strategy that would allow it to appreciate faster in her collection if she paid more for it, but she clearly wasn't getting these as monetary investments - she was getting them to truly capture an artist that she admired.
We visited the sculpture garden out back, which included at least one Rodin. A large-scale "statue" was essentially this skatepark-like floor that was painted black and white, so entering it was like entering an alien, cartoonish landscape. Alisa got targeted by a photographer who liked her white sunglasses and black outfit, which coordinated with the park. There was head tilts to get the art to reflect in her sunglasses, then we got his Instagram handle to check it out later.
The museum was under quite a bit of renovation, so our short time worked out fine. As we were leaving the park, we saw a bunch of cars pulled over. I peeked over as we drove by, and a herd of deer were grazing. The Netherlands don't have a lot of wildlife, apparently.
It was our first evening driving during rush hour, and, despite all the bikes around, there was still plenty of traffic. We eventually got into Utrecht, parked in the designated parking garage a few blocks away, then relaxed for a bit. Utrecht is known for its double-decker canals, so we found the ones right behind our hotel and walked along them, looking for dinner. A burger place called Pickles (which, many reviewers mentioned, didn't have any pickles) had a veggie burger for Alisa, so we popped in. Dinner was very slow, but we weren't in a hurry - until it took half an hour to get our food, after taking fifteen minutes to order, and we were just getting hungry. From an analysis of all the knives and forks being used on the burgers, we were probably being gauche, but I was hungry after all that!
As a treat, and because it was chilly out, we had some ice cream from a stand that was halfway on the bridge over a canal. It was a brisk walk for the last two blocks back, with a chilly bowl in my hand, but finding stracciatella was what I wanted!
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