Amsterdam

Amsterdam was a blur.  And I mean that in the best possible way.  With less than 48 hours to see a city as incredible as Amsterdam, it was and will be the quickest trip I take to another city during my time here in London.  As such, and as the city that Amsterdam is infamous for being, the only way to experience it was to experience it frenziedly.  Luckily, I had three other reckless adventurers by my side to see what kind of trouble we could manage to get into.

We began the morning by cruising through the city's famous canals, mapless and with a hope that if we ambulated around through them long enough, we'd eventually find ourselves somewhere.  Beginning at the main Amsterdam Centraal railway station -- an incredible bit of architecture in its own right -- and heading south toward the rest of the city, I gained a real appreciation for Amsterdam's city planning.  Built in the 17th century during Amsterdam's Golden Age, there are four major canals shaped like a crescent moon that stretch out from the Centraal station area.  I admit that it took one very nice Dutch man taking pity on our lost souls to explain this to us before I fully understood the logic of it all, but before we knew it, we did find ourselves somewhere: right smack in the middle of De Wallen, better known to the rest of us as "The Red Light District."  Enough said on that matter.

La Moisson (The Harvest), 1888

Being pressed for time, the single request I had was to visit the Van Gogh Museum, and I am so pleased we did.  What an absolutely incredible collection it maintains!  The permanent collection contains one of my personal van Gogh favorites, The Harvest.  He painted this landscape during his time in Arles in the summer of 1888, a period during which he was working far more frenziedly than four travelers with only 48 hours in Amsterdam: in little more than a week painting furiously under the scorching June sun, van Gogh had completed upwards of ten paintings and five drawings on his most recent subject matter and newest obsession, wheatfields and the harvest.  Standing before it was a truly transformative experience for me; it is as if the viewer is transported to those fields in that tiny town in the south of France more than a century ago.  The heat of that day and the simplicity of the life being lived out there are tangible.  I have a painting by my very dear family friend and a local artist, Tony Jankowski, hanging above my bed that depicts a scene very similar to The Harvest.  There is something about the rawness of this subject that I find intriguing and humbling.  It would be a nice way to live out one's days in a place where one wakes with the sun and spends time listening to the wind rustling through the wheatfields.  For now, enjoying such a life through a painting done by one of the world's most renowned artists in a city like Amsterdam will certainly do.