Polderslot's masked ball - 1
Hurrah for living just a channel-width from the Netherlands. The good folk of Polderslot were the very first Drachenwalders I ever met, and they hold a special place in my heart. They made me welcome long before I moved kingdoms, and meeting them confirmed to me that I'd be able to make a home in this land.
For the first time in months, I attended an event without Robert - last one was Dance Moot in February. Happily though, this time I shared the trip with armillary , who decided dancing trumped a fighting event in WD, and joined me on a leisurely trip by rail and sail to the Low Countries.
We left Thursday evening from Liverpool st station to catch a train to Harwich (1.5hrs), to take the overnight ferry to the Hoek of Holland. There was a bit of stroppiness from the ticket agent at the station, who was being a dedicated jobsworth about our ticket glitch, until Robert asked quietly if his manager could be any help. This smoothed the path remarkably quickly.
At Harwich, we had a shiny new megaferry almost to ourselves on a weeknight - just a handful of travellers and the usual core of truckers (who get their own bar and club on board as regulars).
Ferrying is a bit like travelling inside an airport departure lounge; the seating is awkward, the food is stupidly overpriced, and for some reason, you drift towards the duty free shop, even though you don't need anything, simply because it's one of the few things to do to kill several hours. The one advantage is that you can get a cabin, with TV, bathroom and relative quiet to avoid your fellow travellers.
In terms of numbers and weather, it couldn't have been more different from tripping to Ireland last month. However, even a huge ferry still rolls a bit in the Channel. After spending the trips to and from Ireland carefully keeping my stomach, I was very glad I was spending most of the trip asleep.
From Hoek our tickets covered trains to any station in Holland, which we used to get to Amsterdam Centraal. Oddly, we ran into only a couple of conductors the whole weekend; Dutch travellers must be very trustworthy fare-paying passengers compared to Brits. We dropped off our bags in the lockers at Centraal, and proceeded to bimble around the city for the day.
Unfortunately the oldest core of Amsterdam is a bit tatty; based on the three main streets closest to the centraal, you'd think Amsterdam was wall-to-wall dope smokers who run tourist traps and sex shops. However, just past these first stretches you get into better shopping areas, markets (including a sizeable weekly book market), and nicer cafes.
At Amsterdam Historic Museum, we found the first excellent room unfortunately handed over to some trendy temporary exhibit - I really hope they put back the original in the fullness of time, so that Amsterdam's history does not only start in 1350.
The Golden Age, of course, takes pride of place - miniature dioramas showing the full extent of the Amsterdam port in the 17th century, examples of family portraits, accounts of the city's efforts to care for the sick, orphaned and mad, and of course, commissioned group portraits of prosperous Dutch city burghers in the City Civic Guard - longbowmen, crossbowmen and halbediers. These are the ones that predate the famous Night Watch portrait by Rembrandt - he sort of cornered the market in his own era.
Frankly, I think Terry Pratchett has ruined serious consideration of any City Guard portraits for me, for at least the next decade. I cannot look at these paintings without trying to figure out which one is Nobby, Colon and Longbottom...
I saw a bit more of the post-period museum exhibits this time. I was surprised at how little space was allotted to WWII; not nearly as much as I'd expected. Maybe there's a dedicated war museum elsewhere.
After lunch we went looking for a script museum (display of writing tools and surfaces) described in my rather dated guidebook. After a couple of false starts, we found that in fact the exhibit at the special collections at UvA is currently packed away - come back in 2 years or so. Sigh.
However, doing laps around the block introduced us to the Allard Pierson museum which proved a fine way to pass the rest of the afternoon - an archeological museum that covered vast swathes of the Middle East, Mediterranean and North Africa. It covered a fascinating stretch of Egypt's history, where the boundary between Egypt and Greece and Rome get a bit vague: Egyptian sarcophagi portraits start looking extremely Grecian in their features, for both men and women.
The display about Alexander the great was an odd one - it seemed to be as much about modern perceptions of Alexander, and how he's reinterpreted or reinvented for every generation, as it was about the facts and evidence of his passing.
We paused in Dam square, only to find that the palace that forms one side of it was covered top to bottom in scaffolding and plastic - only the bell carillion at the very peak of the tower was visible at all. Hrumph. No helicopters landing in the square this time (this really happened on my last visit).
After grabbing respective dinners, we tested our luck on the NL train ticket machines - always a gamble. Will they accept foreign cards? Today, for you, special price! Credit cards only! And we were back on the trains towards the event site. Master Floris met us (with child no. 2 snoozing in the car) and we engaged in the excellent pastime of Find the Site in the Dark with an Out of Date GPS - fun for all the family!