Visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (Netherlands) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (Netherlands) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

Laurent drove me to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Roissy (France), so I could go on a business trip to Amsterdam (Netherlands).

I was staying at the Japanese Okura Hotel, which was the tallest building in Amsterdam at the time.  I was going the weekend before the meeting to do some tourism.  It took an hour to go from Paris to Amsterdam with no time change by plane.

As soon as I arrived at the hotel, I threw my bag on the bed and rushed out to see as much as I could on Saturday of the city.  I almost got hit a few times by throngs of bicyclists as I made my way to a tram stop.

The tram driver spoke perfect English (British, but understandable to an American), which I did not expect.  He told me to exit at Museumplein to visit the Van Gogh Museum. 

A French woman on the Museumplein saw me with the Michelin Touring Green Guide for walking tours and asked me which museum I was going to.

“The Vincent van Gogh Museum,” I answered.

She asked if she could go with me to the Museum.  She worked at a French foreign investment bank and loved it that I had studied East Asian Art at the University of Chicago.

The van Gogh Museum had many paintings from van Gogh’s early period and several representative ones from his time in Provence and Auvers-sur-Oise in France.

My favorite van Gogh paintings were those he did showing inspiration from Japanese painting.  Van Gogh used the Japanese technique of painting at angles to make you feel as if you could walk into the landscape in the painting or pick flowers off the branches in front of you. 

“Landscapes and flower paintings sell well in urban environments,” I told my investment banker museum friend.

Van Gogh received little money and recognition for his work in his lifetime.  His brother Theo had to support him financially.

In one of his letters to Theo, Vincent wrote that he was happy with his artwork and that he was his own harshest critic.

However, van Gogh certainly must have resented handing his cherished artwork over to café owners to pay for meals.  Van Gogh’s café paintings still turn up in Provence and sell for millions.

I read a collection of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother entitled Dear Theo edited by Irving Stone before I visited this museum.  I learned from reading this book that it is good to have a “day job” to create a financial situation for yourself, so you can create what you want and have freedom of expression.

Most of the paintings by van Gogh in this Museum use brown and golden tones rather than the bright yellows, oranges, and blues that were typical of van Gogh’s work in the South of France.  He also painted farm and family scenes most notably The Potato Eaters.

My French banker colleague and I drank a beer in a noisy and smoke-filled Dutch pub.  (All of the pubs were noisy and smoke-filled.)  I was going to order fish in a pub, but said I wanted to eat elsewhere.

We left the pub and walked along the streets with many kinds of restaurants located along them.  We decided to eat dinner in a Tibetan Restaurant.

Tibetan food in its Dutch form seemed to be a heartier form of Mandarin Chinese food.  We ate bao buns with spicy meat and butter tea.  I also ate ribs, French-style with a knife and fork, to keep my hands clean.

My banker colleague and I exchanged phone numbers, so I could go to the Chartier Restaurant in Paris for lunch.  (I was going to lord that over my colleagues at work that I was going to the Parisian Financiers’ Canteen for lunch.  I already felt like the trip to Amsterdam was a pay dirt success.)

We went to our different hotels as I wandered through the streets.  I went in the general direction of the Okura Hotel, keeping it in sight.

On my way, I found the Amstel Beer Factory.  I drank a lot of that as an undergraduate and wanted to take a photograph for my buddies.

I was tired when I arrived back at the hotel.  I flipped the security locks on my hotel door and plopped down into bed and slept peacefully, so I could get up bright and early for a full day of tourism on the next day in Amsterdam.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Montlouis in the French Pyrenees Mountains with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Montlouis in the French Pyrenees Mountains with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

After our busy day in Barcelona, I was happy to sleep in while it rained outside the next day.

When I got up, we went to visit a church from the 7^th century lost in the mountains.

The Black Madonna in the church impressed me.  She sat upright with her child like those in the Uffizi did obtaining authority from her role as a mother.  I knew the story of Isis, Osiris, and Horus from reading Egyptian mythology as a child, so I associated this statue with one of protecting families.

We went to Puigcerda to buy some purchases for our return like Manchego cheese, paper, and pens.

We went to a postcard exposition in the town hall in the city of Montlouis.  The postcards detailed the history of the town and its inhabitants.  I could have stayed there all day, but we had to pack to go to Nantes.

My in-laws and brother-in-law were going back by car.  I bought books all over and those weighty souvenirs would go back by car while Laurent and I would go back by train via Toulouse and then up the coast during the night.

The family dropped us off at the train station in Perpignan.  Laurent and I bought newspapers and magazines and read these until the train came in and stayed up reading till we arrived in Nantes.

My father-in-law picked us up and went to a bakery and bought buttery croissants for us.

Our honeymoon was over.  While we ate our croissants, my father-in-law said, “You have to get a job, Ruth, while Laurent finishes his MBA now.”

“I’ll work on my cover letter and resume,” I said as I worked on my second croissant and smiled about my fun honeymoon.

By Ruth Paget, Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Barcelona (Spain) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Barcelona (Spain) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

The next day, Laurent and I took the train from Puigcerda to the capital of Spanish Catalonia – Barcelona.  I enjoyed looking at the Catalan countryside, especially the farmhouses and the churches with arches in their bell towers.

Barcelona was a pleasant surprise.  The city was clean and full of chic apartment buildings and wealthy enough that tourists did not feel conspicuously rich.

We arrived at the station at 11 am and bought a map.  We took Avenue Provença to the Eixample neighborhood, which houses all the Art Nouveau architecture from the 1890s.  The curving metalwork on the balconies made you feel like you were under water.

Antoní Gaudi’s Casa Mila or La Perdrera as the Catalans call it, especially gave me this feeling.  I remembered being intrigued by this building the first time I saw it in a small photo in an art history book at the University of Chicago; the photo was small, but Gaudi’s genius was huge even in the small photo.

We hustled down the street to see Gaudí’s major work – the still unfinished Sagrada Familia Cathedral.  The Cathedral looks like sand that has been dripped from a fist to make a sandcastle.

The entrance to the Cathedral looked like a dragon’s mouth to me at first view.  After looking at other works by Gaudi in art history books, I think that interpretation is not too far fetched.  Laurent climbed the stairs to the top of the Sagrada Familia Cathedral while I sat on a park bench below and did people watching.

When Laurent came back down from the heights, we walked down Sardenya Street and found a small restaurant to eat at while we were waiting for the Picasso Museum to open.

For my sea-level Catalan meal by the Mediterranean Ocean, I ordered fried calamari as a starter.  I expected fried pieces of tentacles, but instead received whole, fried mini squid.

I squirted lemon juice on the fried calamari and drank them with the Estrella beer we ordered.  Then, we ate fried cod with oven-baked potatoes and ratatouille as our main dish.  I ordered flan made with condensed, milk, egg, and sugar and a caramel sauce for dessert. 

Just as a side note, the elite class of Cuba is mostly Catalan and eats this type of food along with the elite class of Mexico.  Catalan food is like French food for Ivy League graduates or wannabe Ivy.

We walked through the Parc de Ciutadella to find a statue attributed to Antoní Gaudi.  We enjoyed looking at the architecture of the Modern Art Museum in the park and smelled the flowers.  We found the fountain of Gaudi’s woman holding a parasol as we wandered around the park.

After visiting the park, we went to the Picasso Museum.  There were so many paintings in this museum that I was overwhelmed.

Picasso experimented with many styles, but the room that moved me the most was the room with his Blue Period paintings, especially his painting of a tired guitar player bent over his guitar and sleeping. 

We spent several hours in this museum, which is interesting in itself; the museum is made up of two palaces – the Castellet and the Berenguer.

The Berenguer family seems to have done quite well for itself in Barcelona, if you judge by the tomb that is in the Cathedral.  The gothic Barcelona Cathedral was the next stop on our whirlwind tour of Barcelona.

I liked the Cathedral’s cloister with ducks and palm trees best.  There were many chapels around the Cathedral with big iron bars in front of them.

The intricate lacework and polychrome statues were typically Spanish and brought back memories of my art history classes with four slides flashing across the wall of our art history classroom with Professor Rosenthal presiding.

His syllabus readings were huge with chapters from many books.  I stayed in Chicago over semester breaks and read all the art history books on the syllabus and would buy a library pass for summer semester and do the same thing.

When I read books about Goya’s paintings I thought that Spanish peasants were just as exploited as shtetl Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia.  I wanted to see the Prado Museum in Madrid one day. 

Time was flying, and we had a train to catch.  We were thirsty when we boarded the train and did not have any water.  Our thirst just increased over the next three hours back to Puigcerda due to the heat, but we survived.

We had a great visit to Barcelona thanks to our sturdy legs.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the Spanish Enclave of Lluvia inside the French Pyrenees with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Spanish Enclave of Lluvia inside the French Pyrenees with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

After our siesta and lunch, we visited a Spanish enclave in France called Lluvia.  Various wars and treaties left bits and pieces of Spain in France like Lluvia.

I noticed that people in the Cerdagne region of France called themselves Catalan and not French or Spanish.  The shop owners in Lluvia spoke French, Spanish, and English.  They had no problem serving my mother-in-law in French.

I wanted to be trilingual like these people one day and could see that you could make money as a salesman, who could speak several languages selling quality products that were not as expensive as cars.

We returned home and ate another dinner of trout with sliced almonds.  The fatigue of walking in the heat for 6 weeks with no air conditioning in blazing hot countries was catching up with me.  The US has a lot of air conditioning.  (Even at this time, I thought you could park under solar panels that would pay for air conditioning.)

We ate another dinner of trout with sliced almonds.  The fatigue of the last few weeks was catching up with me.  I drank some slightly, sweet wine to go with the trout and almonds and went to bed happy.

The rest and my strong legs served me well on our mountain hike the following day.  We had a picnic lunch by the Val du Galbe.  We sat in the shade by a small stream and looked at the mountains.

We ate ham and butter sandwiches with apples.  I thought some good old American southern fried chicken would have been a nice meal after this hike.

From the Val du Galbe, we drove to Formiguères to visit a church built in the 5^th century AD in the “Roman-Byzantine” style. 

This Roman-Byzantine style at this church described a square church rather than a rectangular one.  Greek churches are usually square with a dome on top.  I also noticed that the priests in the sculptures held mass with their backs to the congregation.  The tour guide spoke French like a Spaniard, so I could understand what he was saying.

After our tour, we ate an omelet with fried potatoes.  I was making an inventory of simple French meals to put together in half an hour during our vacation.

We hiked up another mountain peak on our honeymoon vacation to the Vally d’Eyne.  I liked ham and butter sandwiches on half a baguette, so I knew I had a reward for my hike coming.

We found some trees and took naps in the shade after our hike and listened to a mountain stream tinkling nearby.

After our siesta in the sun, we went to the Spanish border town of Puigcerda.  Laurent and I wanted to visit Barcelona and needed a train schedule.  My father-in-law pointed out the buildings in town that had been damaged during the Spanish Civil War when we drove into town.

I was surprised that the buildings still stood without being repaired.  They made me feel incredibly close to George Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia, which I read in college.

Laurent’s parents go to mass on Saturdays, so we headed out to Font Romeu for mass.  The Catalans sing whenever they can.  All the mass responses were sung instead of spoken.  Two nuns played the guitar.  My “mass French” had improved, so I could follow what was happening.

We ate grilled lamb outside that night.  My brother-in-law put up a screen and showed slides of “the royal wedding” in Joué-les-Tours, various photos of Versailles where my brother-in-law was in perfume school, and glimpses of a trip Laurent and I took to Lyons (France) to visit his aunt and uncle.

When we looked at the slides of Versailles, I said, “I’ll tell my American friends that my in-laws live there,” I said.  We sat around giggling eating popcorn with sugar on it like the French serve it.

A few days later, we celebrated the name days of one of Laurent’s family friends on August 15^th – the Assumption of the Virgin.  In Catholic countries, you have a party on the day that honors the saint you are named after with a nice lunch for your friends and family.

We went to a Catalan restaurant in a hotel for the celebration.  We ate cantaloupe with air-dried mountain ham called Serrano as a starter.

To this day, I still love the melt-in-your-mouth creamy white, fat on Serrano ham.  We ate roast lamb with small, green kidney-shaped beans called flageolets.

For dessert, we ate crema catalana with a caramelized crust on top and a slice of orange in the bottom.  This dessert is a tropical crème brulée.

I liked this simple Catalan meal from the mountain regions of Cerdanya and Rosillón as they were written in the Catalan language.  These meals reminded me of reading and marveling at the restaurant reviews of Jay Jacobs as a kid in Gourmet magazine, which read like Margaret Mead’s anthropology books.

After lunch, we went to Saillagouse to see Catalan dances.  Little boys dressed in black hoisted themselves to the top of human pyramids while girls clad in red danced around them.

I thought activities like this happened only for tourists, but I could see parents and grandparents taking pictures of grandchildren, too.  I was the only tourist in town and was having fun.

I asked to participate in the candlelight procession for Saint Mary at Font Romeu.  There is a man-made hill there that is constructed to look like a Calvary with crosses on it.

The procession started there and meandered through the countryside to the church.  The candles the church gave us fit inside holders that gave out enough light, so we could sing the words of Ave Maria in Latin.

The Latin words filled the air.  We all crammed into the church to hear the homily at the end of our procession.  Despite the words, I felt as if I had participated in a pre-Christian rite.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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