The one negative of coming to Delft is that it pretty much looks like Amsterdam, so there's not an overwhelming need to make the trip. It has fewer canals and more straightforward roads than Amsterdam does, but the canals are still oh so cute.



Delft does have a couple of unique historical sights since it's the hometown of the Dutch royal family, and its world famous Delft pottery. Delftware, which is fairly kitschy nowadays, used to be very prized throughout the world. Its blue and white patterns actually came from copying the Chinese pottery that Dutch traders were bringing back from their trading voyages.

As I was talking about Blake's I realized that I hadn't included anything about our hotel in Amsterdam, the Pulitzer. Amsterdam has dozens of hotels in renovated canal houses that range from basic to superluxe, but each is quite charming. (They've also got the usual chains and a few grand dames as well, but the old canal mansions are heavy favorites here). The Pulitzer is probably the most famous of this type, but unfortunately much of the charm of the concept is destroyed by the hotel's size. The hotel is housed in a string of about a dozen old houses, and looks fantastic from the outside. The inside is a confusing maze, as you'd expect, so that was fine as well. But the public areas are too bland and corporatized, apart from a lovely courtyard open for breakfast and drinks. And the rooms were completely sanitized as well. We didn't take any photos of our room, which is indicative of how boring it was. I included the hotel's photo of a room, which is full of quirkiness, so either we got stuck with a bum room or they've completely overhauled the rooms, because our room bore no resemblance to this. We got a big suite, which sprawled across a few of the houses, and consequently was on several different levels. But that was the extent of the quirkiness, the rest was beige carpets and white walls, with some cheap looking furniture to highlight the room's ordinariness. I remember when my sister and I visited Amsterdam many years earlier,we stayed in a much cheaper B&B whose name escapes me, but it was perfectly preserved and utterly charming, a stark contrast to the blandness of the Pulitzer. overall-5 (Room-5, Facilities-6, Service-6).

Of course Amsterdam is best known for its permissive attitude toward all things sex and drug related. Since neither drugs nor bored bikini clad women bathed in red light hold much interest for us, we didn't spend much time exploring Amsterdam's wild side. We walked through the red light district, which is, as expected, depressing. Other than the hundreds of nearly naked women standing in windows everywhere you walk the neighborhood actually looks like the rest of the city, mostly seventeenth century brick homes adapted for present day purposes. There's a sex museum and a fountain with a big penis in it to try to make the area more fun-touristy, but the feeling is decidedly unfun-sex touristy. There is one pretty cool sight to see in the area, Our Lord in the Attic church. After the Protestants took over, the Catholic churches were converted into Protestant churches, and the city's Catholics had to worship out of sight. This church is located, as the name implies, in the attic of an unprepossessing house. The entire house is preserved as a museum, and looks just like you'd expect a boring, middle class seventeenth century house to look like, until you go up a hidden flight of stairs and find a whole mini-church up there, and quite elaborate as well.

Just rounding out the major museums on Museumplein. The ugly office building is the Van Gogh museum, which contains by far the largest collection of Van Gogh's artwork in the world. However, almost every museum in the world has at least one Van Gogh as he was a very busy painter, and it's fair to say the others got the pick of the litter. There aren't any of the artworks you learn about in art history here, but it's still impressive to see all these works in one building. The museum contains most of the paintings in Van Gogh's possession at the time of his death, and it's still run by members of his family. The Victorian brick building incongruously holds the Stedelijk Museum of modern art.

The very organised citizens of Amsterdam arranged all their major cultural institutions on a very large, but somewhat bleak, plaza called Museumplein, no translation necessary. The Rijksmuseum (the one with the bikes in front of it) is the chief art museum of the Netherlands, and the definitive collection of Dutch and Flemish painting in the world. There's a very impressive Hall of Honour when you first walk in with gargantuan Rembrandts, but the rest of the museum is a bit confusing, endless white rooms arranged like a maze. And Dutch painting, to stereotype, is mostly very dark, smallish paintings of ugly people or fruit, so dozens of rooms full of these can wear you down a bit. While the Dutch have a very impressive artistic history, they are nowhere in music. The city belatedly tried to rectify this by building the nearby Concertgebouw, which supposedly has some of the best acoustics in the world.

When Amsterdam switched to Protestantism, a large number of monasteries and convents suddenly became useless. Most of these were converted to orphanages or hospitals, which remains their present function, while some have reverted to religious functions as the Dutch moved from rigidly Protestant to not caring about religion. A few of these complexes are quite famous, and I actually remember this one, which had a beautiful garden that's very inviting after a long night out and a long day of museum-hopping. Unfortunately I can't seem to locate its name, so it will just have to be the mystery building for now.

The Nieuwe Kirk (or New Church for those of you so monolingual that you can't translate from Dutch) sits right next to the Royal Palace. This is one of two old Catholic churches that were stripped of decoration, stained windows smashed, and repainted white to make it a boringly proper Protestant church. While the Protestants eventually won the religious war in Holland, it was touch and go for a few decades and the Protestants sometimes got ahead of themselves. For example, a bunch of Anabaptists thought it would be a good idea to strip and dance naked in the plaza, for I guess religious reasons that I don't quite grasp. Anyway, the city authorities thought otherwise, and cut their chests open, ripped out their hearts, shoved them in their mouths and cut off their heads to use as decoration along the city walls. Another (clothed) Protestant group stormed this church, then called the Church of Our Lady, and smashed it up. One seven year old girl threw her shoe at a statue of Mary. This proved to be a decade too soon for this sort of thing, as the little girl was enclosed in a barrel and floated off to sea. The church was in the process or erecting a huge spire when the Protestants took over, but that was stopped, so the massive church looks like more like a government building than a church.

These are some of the buildings in the center of the city, around the Royal Palace. Dam Square is the huge plaza surrounding the Palace, and lots of busy roads converge on the area. It's perpetually busy, crammed with tourist kitsch, horrible restaurants and very drunk people. Since it's the very center of the city, and contains the palace and the city's oldest church it's impossible to avoid but there's really nothing nice about it.

For most of the middle ages, Holland was ruled by the Spanish Hapsburgs, which wasn't very popular at the best of times. However, once the reformation swept through Northern Europe, Amsterdam's merchants became strong Protestant supporters and therefore on a collision course with the Spanish monarchs bent on crushing Protestantism. The usual battles back and forth, but to cut a long story short, the Spanish eventually lost Holland, and Amsterdam adopted a severe Calvinist protestant very similar to the pilgrims and puritans of New England. They busied themselves by "redecorating" the Catholic churches at first, but in 1620 they built their first church from scratch, the Westerkerk. The Protestants were hellbent on making churchgoing as boring as possible, so in addition to doling out boring church names like West Church, they also painted everything white, took out all images, stained glass, and pretty much anything of interest. Having said that, the interior is actually quite handsome. The church is very close to Anne Frank's house, and she writes about hearing the bells in her diary. Since I don't have a journal for this trip, these posts are in random order, but I guess that's the reason this post follows the Anne Frank one.

While Amsterdam is pretty much a giant party now, it does have its share of terrible history, particularly in World War II. The city was comparatively liberal when it came to religion, and acted as something of a safe haven for religious minorities (the pilgrims who sailed to Plymouth on the Mayflower originally fled from England to Holland first). For this reason, Amsterdam probably had the largest Jewish population in Europe before the war, and also the most famous war victim, Anne Frank. The house where she and her family hid in the secret annex must be the city's most visited sight, and it's quite moving. There's an immediacy to her diary and the house that makes you feel like she's right there, and it's really moving to see all the newspaper cutouts of movie stars and childish paintings she plastered on her walls. Of course the crowds take some of the solemnity out of the experience, but I had been a few times and was really moved by it. This time I wasn't however, because somewhere in the warren of rooms I lost Somchai. He has a terrible sense of direction, and I doubted he even knew the name of the hotel we were staying at, so after looking for him by going through the museum four times, I thought I would never see him again, which would not be a good way for us to start our married life. Fortunately on the fifth trip through, I found him, and tied a leash on his neck for the rest of the trip (not really).

92. Amsterdam

The rest of the trip is a complete blur, with no journal and a spotty photo record. I dimly remember we drove to Monroe and stayed with my parents for a few hours, then we continued on to JFK for our flight back to Bangkok via Singapore Air. Since that flight stops in Amsterdam, we decided to stop there for a few days as our honeymoon, but it was very much an afterthought and very little planning went into it. A few of our Bangkok guests had the same idea, and (I think) Khun Ann, Pen, and Gina ended up on our flight. Somchai and I were alone for most of the day, but we hooked up with the Bangkok crowd at night for some very late nights that I really can't recall.
I wouldn't recommend Amsterdam as a honeymoon destination, since it's not exactly romantic, but it is definitely a gay mecca, vying with London for the title of Europe's gay capital. So in this context it made sense as a stopping off point after a gay wedding. Pictured here is the Homomonument, the only monument in Europe to the tens of thousands of gays killed in Hitler's concentration camps during the second world war. (Actually to be totally up to date, I saw that Vienna just unveiled a very impressive gay memorial as well).