Viewing Malevich's Paintings and Eating Indonesian Food in Amsterdam (Netherlands) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Viewing Malevich's Paintings and Eating Indonesian Food in Amsterdam (Netherlands) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Of course, the next day was my vacation day as well, so I was out the hotel door at 8 am to explore Amsterdam (Netherlands).

I visited the historical part of downtown by the Royal Palace and a little area called the Beguinage – the site of a former church of reformed Presbyterians called the Beguines.

From there, I walked from one end to the other of the main canals – the Singel, the Herengracht, and the Keizersgracht.  I made a few stops to buy coffee with cream.  Walking along canals to admire architecture is cold yet informative tourism for learning about architecture that is not usually introduced in university art history courses.

I walked along the Leiderstraat and found myself on Museumplein again.  I visited the Municipal Museum and enjoyed Malevich’s paintings such as “White Square on White.”  He reminded me of another Dutch painter named Mondrian, who did “security systems” paintings I thought for office decoration.

I went back on Leidestraat and found an Indonesian Restaurant.  I was going to see the Rembrandt collection at the Rijksmuseum, but my innocent sounding Rijstafel (Rice Table Lunch) took three hours to consume. 

Indonesian food is so spicy that you have to wipe away tears away as you eat it.  I loved every morsel, but I had to drink a lot of water to deal with the heat.  I planned to buy an Indonesian cookbook and learn to make this delicious food, but tone down the spices a bit.

After the dragon-hot meal, I just enjoyed walking around Amsterdam and buying coffee with cream and looking at stores and apartments.  I knew everyone at work would laugh at my wild weekend in Amsterdam with its liberal drug and prostitution laws.

The next day I wrote down some Amsterdam notes before returning to Paris:

-Windows – Building windows are so clean in Amsterdam that they glisten in the sun.  Glistening windows make brown brick buildings with red geraniums look very upscale no matter what kind of neighborhood they are in.

-Pulleys are located on rooftops of buildings to make moving furniture in and out of apartments easy.

-Amsterdam has great urban planning.  The city has a lot of trains, canals, and bikes for moving people and goods around quickly.

-I think the Netherlands is the largest market for bicycles outside the Peoples’ Republic of China.

-Fashion from the 1960s prevailed in Amsterdam in the 1990s.  (Blue jeans, T-shirts, and tennis shoes.)

-Amsterdam has many good bookstores including English ones.  The City of International Trade requires many multilingual lawyers, bankers, accountants, and salesmen.

If you plan to visit Amsterdam and visit its art museums, I would recommend reading Simon Schama’s  The Embarassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age and Rembrandt’s Eyes.  People of English descent should read about our ancestral trading and naval rivals.

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

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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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