Debi Simons

There’s quite a bit about food in the following material, and I needed a platform on which to post it, so here it is for those who’d like to read it:

Please note: I wrote the following material about my husband’s and my trip mainly for my own sake so that I’d enjoy remembering and in a sense reliving all that we did, but some people have expressed an interest in reading it. So take it for what it’s worth! The real treat (if I can pull it off) will be a narrated slide show featuring Jim’s pictures, but that’s going to take me a while. I did a fair-to-middling job of keeping a journal up to date on a somewhat-daily basis during the trip itself and then went back in and filled in more detail.

This trip was a follow-up to the one last year in May to the Netherlands and France, which included our son Gideon for the entire trip and Jim’s sister Carol for part of it. As usual, we felt that we hadn’t gotten to everything we wanted to see, so Jim and I had planned to go back in 2024 during the month of April, the official Tulip Festival. Since our 2022 trip had originally been scheduled for 2020 and been delayed for two years, we didn’t think our return plans were too self-indulgent. Then, sometime last fall, Jim happened to notice on his news feed that there was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum from Feb. to June of this year, so we decided to move the trip up. We almost didn’t get tickets because of my procrastination, but in the end Jim prevailed. I’m so glad we went ahead for this year!

4/10—We departed at 12:10 MDT from Denver International Airport.

4/11–We landed in Amsterdam about 9:00 AM their time after a smooth and uneventful trip, although I didn’t get as much sleep as I should have. I was dying for coffee and got some at a MacDonald’s clone where I apparently threw my credit card out with the trash. Jim later dealt with this issue after I discovered it was missing when I went to get coffee at the Vermeer exhibit. Chase was willing to suspend my card but leave his active. (Turned out later that I’d just tucked it inside my pepto-bismol pills packets. So I/Jim got Chase to turn the card back on. Have to say that they were very nice about it. But keep reading to find out how I finally lost it for good.)

We got to our (very small) hotel room that had a weird arrangement of the toilet’s being inside the shower and two small beds that I’m convinced came from a monastery somewhere, took a nap, and then went to the Hermitage and Amsterdam Museums. There was a fabulous exhibit on Rembrandt and his legacy, which prepared us well for a later visit to Rembrandt’s house. There was also an exhibit of dolls from a collection by a Jamaican woman that were her attempt to document forgotten people, mostly slaves. She did an incredible amount of research, named every doll, and made them detailed and lifelike even when she didn’t have to do so (i.e., under their clothes—genitalia, chest hair, nipples, the whole nine yards). There was much more to the place, but I have to admit that I did some dozing on benches here and there. We had dinner at a Lebanese restaurant/takeout place near our hotel which was fabulous. I’m going to try and recreate their lentil soup. Came back to hotel and crashed.

4/12 Vermeer day! We spent quite a while in this very small (only 27 paintings) exhibit and thoroughly enjoyed it. Our tickets were for 9:00 but we got there by 8:30 and so had a chance to talk to people who’d made the trip especially for this. We did not tell them that Vermeer was simply a cherry on top for us. I had one of my “I thought my heart would stop” moments as I came up the stairs and saw the first painting, his “View of Delft.” I kind of wish he’d painted more outdoor scenes. Just being there, with people who’d come from all over the world to see this, was an experience in itself. My favorite Vermeer? I suppose the Delft one, followed very closely by “The Little Street.” We then tromped through a lot of the rest of the Rijks, after having a surprisingly decent lunch at their café. Then it was time for a concert at the Concertgebuow after having another quick dinner at the Lebanese place. We walked very quickly to get there on time! The pianist was just overwhelmingly good—a young man no more than 25 years old named Florian Verweij who had a fabulous program of Schumann, Debussy, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. He’s this small, thin person who does no bobbing and weaving over the keyboard. I have no idea how he produced the incredible sound and range of dynamics that he did. That place was packed—the man who introduced the program joked that he wasn’t sure he was going to get a seat. We walked home (which was a fair hike) and saw a heron in the street on the way. I guess he made it back to a canal okay—we’ll hope so. Crashed mightily!

4/13 Today was Keukenhof day, so we had to be up at 6:00 to get to get our bus at 8:00. It was FREEZING—cloudy, rainy, and windy. But we persevered! My multiple layers did quite well, although I sure wish I’d packed a little differently and included my fleece jacket. We spent some time in the covered gardens until the sun came out. Jim took about 5,000 pictures. It’s just unbelievable. Last year we’d gotten here in May, just two days before it closed for the season, and that was great, too—but a significant number of tulips had already had their day. This time there were still some that hadn’t bloomed, but not many. The gardens are open for only eight weeks in the year, and they plan and plant and plot the rest of the year so that there’s that so-called “succession of bloom.” It’s just mind-boggling. After lunch at the gardens (surprisingly good) we got back to town and went on a canal ride which didn’t have as much funny commentary as last time, but it was very nice. (The audio recounted the urban myth about where the saying “stinking rich” comes from, only it was presented as being true, which it isn’t. But I’m not going to take the time to explain it here.) And we were inside, which counted for a lot. Then we decided to go out on the town for an Indonesian dinner for Indonesian food but not a whole “rice table,” which would be a total waste. Instead we went to this little place near our hotel that we’d looked at the night before called Tashi Deleg and got a smaller version of a rice table that was basically a combo plate. It was so great! We got home by 9:00 and, you guessed it, crashed.

4/14 A day with wonderful surprises. We had tickets to the “Rembrandt House” museum which I thought wasn’t going to be much of a muchness. We decided to get breakfast on the way, but Jim felt that his rather small plate of rather small pancakes was inadequate, so when we saw this nice-looking little bakery we decided to stop for MORE CARBS. There was a table in the back and a pretty 30-something woman sitting there on her phone with headphones on, so we just started in on our very good stuff. A couple and their son came and sat with us, we exchanged greetings (they were from Denmark, I think), and the young woman started talking, first to the Danish woman and then to all of us. We joined in, I asked her what she did, and she said she was a fashion designer, had her own studio, and had taken her collections to the Paris shows the previous year. To be honest, she looked awfully young for being that far up in the industry, but she seemed to know what she was talking about, and I happened to have a little familiarity with the couture business and could ask some fairly intelligent questions. I wish I’d asked her if she had a website. We were having a great time, but after only 10-15 minutes we had to go. As we got back out on the street Jim said, “Well, that wasn’t on my radar!” On to the Rembrandt house, which is actually the house he lived in for 19? years. Honestly, it was just super. The audioguide was great, and I got in on an etching demonstration which was fabulous. (Jim missed it.) There was enough art in that house to make up a decent art museum. (I did get a little tickled at the description of a painting of Jacob’s meeting with Rachel—no, she was not Jacob’s niece! She was his cousin, the daughter of his uncle Laban.) They’ve gone to enormous trouble to re-create the feel of the place. I felt that I really learned about Rembrandt. Then we hustled a fair ways to watch a multimedia presentation about Rembrandt’s last days—it was okay, I guess. (These two items, as well as a number of other things, were included in our “GoCity” card, which turned out to be a very good deal.) Well, at this point we were really hungry and got some Indian food that was good but took way longer than I’d thought it would, with the result that we got to the Museum of Modern Art at 4:00 and it closes at 5:00. So we used our GoCity card and looked at a bunch of really awful contemporary stuff, were just getting to the modern stuff (Picasso and such) and then were kicked out. Oh well, we thought, maybe we can come back. (See below for how that came out.) We didn’t really need dinner b/c we’d had such a late lunch, so I suggested ice cream and we trekked to this gelato place that was awesome. Staggered home in the cold, tried to get some work done on planning, but were pretty knackered.

4/15 Zaanse Schans day, with departure of a tour at 11:30. We got breakfast at the little pancake house I’d wanted to go to earlier across from the train station, “Pancakes Amsterdam.” I was feeling quite grumpy without food and coffee, but we made it before I collapsed completely and each got a bacon, mushroom and cheese pancake. Great! I can’t figure out why there wasn’t a line out the door, but the place was pretty quiet. Then we hustled back to the place where we were catching the bus for our tour, which was fabulous although way too short. (This is why we don’t usually do group tours, but it was included on our card.) We got to this rather touristy restored fishing village at about 12:15 and had to be back on the bus by 2:30. We were the last ones back to the bus, I’m afraid. But—and this is very important—it turns out that this was indeed the area where Monet visited and painted. I’d really wanted to see that place after we saw the Monet exhibit at the Denver Art Museum Christmas of 2021, but then when I looked it up there didn’t seem to be anything special there. Wrong! The last thing we saw at the little museum before we ran back to the bus was one of his paintings done there and also a timeline showing all the others he painted. When we got back to town we tried to revisit the Museum of Modern Art, but it turns out that you can use the GoCity card only once per attraction. Boo! It’s so expensive that we didn’t want to pay full price for only an hour. We had a nice time in the book/gift store, though, and then went back to the Indonesian/Tibetan place and had another fabulous meal, this time from the Tibetan side of the menu. Came home fairly early to do plotting and planning for day trips.

4/16 Sunday, and we went to a 9Marks church only a few minutes from us after having nice-but-rather-small-and-pricey pastries and coffee at the Screaming Beans coffee shop. It had a beautiful place in the back to sit, with some rather weird photographs of flowers. On to church. We were way too early and so got into a great conversation with a woman who’d just moved here from Nigeria. Great service (but the sermon was too short)—we plan to go again next Sunday. And then it was on to the Muiderslot Castle! My word—I have no idea how people navigate all of this without Jim’s talents of figuring out routes. We took a tram and then a train, and Jim had to stand there at the ticket entrance to figure out why our Eurail pass wasn’t working. But he did it, and we got on the train with time to spare, getting to the small-ish town of Weesp. Had lunch at a neighborhood bar/café where a group of little girls was having a birthday party in the front. Little girls are the same the world over! Because bus service was so spotty Jim decided to get an Uber out to the castle itself, which worked out great, as our driver had just dropped a fare off and got there quickly to pick us up. We spent a lovely afternoon clambering all over the place—great audio guide, fantastic views, etc. There’s so much I don’t know about Dutch history! We wandered along the canal where Jim spotted several of his beloved coots, then managed to catch the bus this time, then the train, then a tram back to our neighborhood, then dinner at the Lebanese place. Home fairly early to relax and plan.

4/17 We squeezed in as many places as possible in Amsterdam today, as tomorrow we’re starting in on day trips. We’d decided we wanted to go back to the Resistance Museum we’d visited last year which deals with Dutch anti-Nazi activities during WWII. First stop, though, was the never-found Tulip Museum from last time. It’s quite small, and perhaps not quite up to the Swarte Tulipe in Lisse from last year, but quite good and with a lovely gift shop. After grabbing lunch somewhere it was on to the Resistance Museum, which had a lot of stuff I didn’t remember from last time. (So what else is new?) Then we went across the street to the zoo, another venue included on our GoCity card. I’d said I wasn’t interested in zoos, as I find them rather sad, but since it was right there it seemed silly not to at least pop in. Honestly, it was lovely—almost more of a botanical garden with animals than anything else. The elephant enclosure alone was worth the visit, although I couldn’t help thinking that those elephants were sure taking up a lot of real estate in a city with a severe housing shortage. Then, because I have such great memories of our last time here, we trekked back to the Turkish restaurant we liked so much on that trip, Marmaris Grill and Pizza, and I had that grilled chicken again. Home quite tired.

By the way, since this is what everyone thinks of when you mention Amsterdam, yes, at some point we did end up in the infamous red-light district. What we were really trying to find was the Old Church, the largest and oldest cathedral in the city. Well, it’s so hemmed in by other buildings that you don’t get the full effect, and we didn’t try to go in as it was after 5:00. Jim’s phone was telling us to cut down a little pedestrians-only street beside the church and so we did. Suddenly I realized that all of the doorways had red neon lights around them and signs on the doors saying something about “this room available” or some such. Just as the light (the red light) was dawning, there was a bigger street-level window with a woman in her underwear (but no more immodest than a Victoria’s Secret model, to be clear) doing some sort of little robotic-looking dance. No one seemed to be knocking on any doors, probably because it was so early in the evening. Most of the activity takes place after 1:00 AM, when the bars start closing down. I find the whole thing to be sad, dehumanizing, and enraging, and, honestly, in the end, very puzzling. (Yes, I’m a big girl—I know all about prostitution. And I know that Amsterdam is only making public and legal what goes on all the time, all over the world, usually illegally and often dangerously.) We ended up walking through only a couple of blocks, but it’s a fairly big section of the city with all sorts of subsidiary businesses, including the aforementioned bars. So that was our experience, for what it’s worth.

4/18 First of our day trip days, to Haarlem. Last year the only place we went was the Corrie ten Boom house, which was totally awesome but left us no time for anything else. Our first not-great restaurant meal of the trip occurred here, alas, which also took time we couldn’t afford and meant that we had to take a later tour of the windmill and then ended up with only half an hour at the Frans Hals Museum, a very interesting place that would have been well worth several hours. Oh well. You can’t foresee everything. I was in kind of a snit about the café at the Teylers Museum (the museum itself is totally awesome) because I felt that we were being ignored. We should have just eaten a granola bar and called it good. But there it is. One nice piece of serendipity, though—we took a look in the Great Church which appears on Rick Steves’ episode on “Amsterdam and Beyond” and which is supposed to have free weekly organ concerts. According to their website those don’t start until May, and what were the chances that we’d get in on that anyway? Our mediocre restaurant was right across the square from the church, though, so we wanted to at least take a look. Well1 Not only was it open, and free, and full of interesting things, but THE ORGANIST STARTED PLAYING WHILE WE WERE THERE. I think he was just warming up and keeping in practice—he (or she) played only three pieces. I was so chuffed that we got to hear it. And of course if we hadn’t been delayed by the mediocre restaurant we wouldn’t have been there at the right time. We walked past the Corrie ten Boom museum entrance a couple of times—they were showing no times available except for one slot in Dutch. Just emphasizes once again how fortunate we were to get in last year. So we got back to town around 6:30 and went to the Meat and Greek place that’s always looked so good and had such a cute name—and it was indeed great. Decided that we hadn’t done nearly enough walking and so went and got some ice cream—not quite as good as the gelato we got earlier, but much closer to our hotel and still very good. We got back to the room AND IT STILL HADN’T BEEN CLEANED. We’ve been here for OVER A WEEK! And they wouldn’t let us cancel Sunday night, but we’ll show them—we’re leaving anyway. Honestly! Hotel Max is NOT getting a good review from us.

4/19—Enkhuizen day. This is like the Netherlands’ answer to Colonial Williamsburg—no big flashy signs, no neon lights, just small tasteful placards in Dutch and English, plus some re-enactors. We saw a blacksmith and a fish smoker, getting a hunk of some of the best smoked salmon I’ve ever tasted. No eels, alas! Perhaps they’re not as popular with tourists as they used to be. But it was so cool to see the bench where everyone’s eating their fish on the Rick Steves program. (Yes, I’m weird.) We had a very good lunch in their café—some kind of “warm spiced chicken” sandwich on excellent bread, and braved much, much wind. But we were also very, very glad not to be fishermen, and especially not to be drowned in the periodic floods. Or have our traditional industries destroyed by synthetic nets, dikes cutting off the ocean, and others I can’t remember. A hard, hard life, now immortalized for us rich tourists. The most poignant story was that of a father and his two sons marooned on an ice floe for two weeks. They were all rescued, but sadly the father and one son died soon after from the ill effects. Well, I was feeling pretty knackered, but Jim suggested that we stop somewhere along the way to eat dinner in a different town. (Amsterdam has no restaurants, of course.) So we got off the train at Hoorn and headed for this place that Jim looked up. That place was hopping! And it was a weeknight! Anyway, the nice waitress seated us at the bar and we were very warmly welcomed even with our abstemious drinking habits. (We’ve given up on the whole “tap water” thing, but we order a “bottle of still water to share.”) I ordered the “catch of the day,” which turned out to be halibut. The bartender and some guys sitting next to us seemed to get a big kick of pronouncing “halli-boot” a number of times. I think they were teasing the bartender. Jim got “surf and turf,” which turned out to be steak and a skewer of shrimp, and both of our meals were absolute standouts. That fish . . . I’ll dream of it from now on. Excellent quality, perfectly cooked. So great! So then we finally staggered home. One item was to figure out when to visit this putative Van Gogh Village that a nice man in the Vermeer line had told us about. Jim had tried to look it up earlier and it seemed to be saying that the museum was closed for renovations until September. I was all of a doo-dah to go anyway, and then was fully justified when it turned out that the place was re-opening . . . tomorrow. We couldn’t get tickets for the first day but got them for the 21^st. So what were we going to do on the 20^th? Well . . .

4/20 Go to Leiden, of course. What else? (After having another pancake breakfast at the Pancake Amsterdam restaurant.) And why were we going there, you may ask? Well, because this nice English couple that we’d met at Enkhuizen had said it was very pretty and had some good museums. The understatement of the year, it turns out. We headed for the “antiquities museum” because it was closest to the train station and open the earliest, and were able to tour something world class. This place—words fail me. Just to give you an idea—there are three surviving imperial cameos in the world, that is, large (maybe 2’ x 1 ½’ or so—that’s feet, not inches) carved cameos that commemorate an Emperor’s accomplishments, with a gold jeweled frame. One is in Paris, one in Vienna, and the third one is in Leiden. The Leiden one is in honor of Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge, complete with angel. And that one item is just a taste of the riches on display there, which include a complete Egyptian temple that you can walk through. Their Egyptian rooms rivaled the Louvre’s, and that’s saying something. We were just blown away. There were some very good explanations about how the museum or the Netherlands in general got these artifacts. There have certainly been many stolen items over the centuries, but in the case of this museum most of their stuff came from legitimate and licensed archaeological expeditions, with permission given by the Egyptian government to dig and also take the resulting artifacts. The temple is there because it was going to be destroyed in the flooding resulting from the Aswan Dam, and apparently this museum was asked to rescue it. It has no inscriptions on the walls, so they haven’t done the cover-with-glass approach. (I do kind of think that the British Museum should have to return the so-called “Elgin Marbles,” the friezes that were taken from the Parthenon in Athens, but nobody’s asked for my opinion on that one.) So we spent quite a bit of time there, but that was just our first stop. After consuming what Jim insists on calling “crunchy-wunchy bars,” we headed for the Pilgrim Museum. Wh-a-a-a-t? Yes, don’t you remember your early American history? The Pilgrims fled England and first went to the Netherlands, specifically Leiden. Hmmm, we thought. Should be kind of interesting. Well, you know what I’m going to say: words fail me. Here we were in the last surviving 17^th-century house in Leiden, but with parts of it dating back to the Middle Ages (including a nice medieval staircase that I almost fell down), and a tour guide who I’m convinced knew some of these people personally. It’s another one of those “we shouldn’t have been able to do this” things. A group was just leaving, and for about half an hour we had this fabulous young woman giving us a private lecture/tour. Then another American couple joined us, and for the next hour we just imbibed history through our very pores. But then it was 5:00 and time to go. Seemed too early for dinner in Leiden, so we got on a train and went to The Hague, got off, had a very good Indian dinner, got back on the train, and came home. Whew!

4/21 Van Gogh day in Nuenen. Was it, as I had imagined, a little untouched village with the horses still in the streets? Well, no. It’s a bustling little city, and I’m sure that the businesses around the EXCELLENT Van Gogh museum were very glad when it re-opened. They’ve built a whole new addition on to the old house that contained the original one. Across the street was the parsonage where Van Gogh’s father lived, with a little structure set back from the house that VG himself used as a studio. (You can’t go in, sadly—it looks like someone is actually living there. Imagine that!) Really, it was quite a day. We didn’t make it to all 16 or so markers as I was getting pretty weary, but we saw most of them, standing in front of the church where VG Sr. preached and which VG painted a picture of to give to his mom who couldn’t go to church for a long time because she’d broken her leg! Really, except for an overemphasis (to me, anyway) on “The Potato Eaters” (VG’s first major painting, which I believe he completed in Nuenen), it was just great. (There was even a sculpture of the blasted thing!) So we staggered back onto the train and stopped for dinner (for the second time this trip) at our old friend from last year, Marmaris Grill. Had an excellent meal and staggered home. This is where I lost my credit card for the second and final time. I realized as we were getting ready to get onto the metro that I didn’t have it. If I’d been able to mentally retrace my steps a little more quickly I’d have realized what had happened—that I must have put it in my rain jacket’s pocket without thinking instead of putting it back in my security wallet as I’ve been so careful to do. Then when I put my jacket back on I sort of had to flip it around a bit, standing outside so I didn’t block anyone inside. It must have fallen out then. I did go back and look where we’d sat and also asked at the desk, but I didn’t think about looking outside. The point is, you have to keep your focus and not lose track. Here’s the lasting image from this little incident, though—Jim standing out in the big plaza in front of the restaurant, calling Citibank on his cell phone FOR THE SECOND TIME and getting them to cancel the card. To be clear—I do have a second card that I can use for the metro, trams and buses. Jim had gotten us the other cards because they don’t charge foreign transaction fees, but I don’t do much in the way of charges on my own. He was just a champ about the whole thing.

4/22 Tulip Festival Parade Day! Honestly, I thought this was a non-starter but was game to try and see it. We just couldn’t seem to get a website that showed the actual route for anything except the major points, which were going to be mob scenes. Finally I copied and pasted the actual Dutch name of the event (“Bollenstreek”) into the browser and got a totally different website that showed all of the towns where the parade would go. Much more helpful! Jim of course figured out what seemed like the best small-town location (actually the starting point) and how to get there, and in spite of some slowdowns we managed to get there in time to see everything except a couple of sponsor vehicles. It was like a small Dutch version of the Rose Bowl Parade, which I have fond memories of watching as a kid on New Year’s Day. Then we went back to Leiden to see what we’d missed the day before, climbed around an outdoor castle-y sort of thing and then went to the Lakenhal Museum which a visitor at the Pilgrim Museum had mentioned as being very good, as indeed it was. I’m afraid I was a bit museumed out, but what I did take in was very good. There was quite a bit about the weaving industry that was such a big part of the economy there for some time, and you could even buy meters of cloth made on the old looms and using the old techniques (although the use of urine has been superseded by other chemical agents) for as little as 130 Euros per meter. I said, “Well, I could make a very expensive vest from that!” (But I did not buy any of it, just to be clear.) We got back to Amsterdam and staggered to our little Lebanese place, had their hummus and strange-but-good candied pumpkin dessert (along with other stuff), and then thought we could manage to do some laundry. Well, let’s just say that it was our first failure of the day. And we won’t be around to try again tomorrow, as we’re leaving town. I can’t believe our time in The Netherlands is almost over.

4/23 Sunday, last day in Amsterdam! We got ourselves packed and headed out to our favorite little coffee place, Coffee Kalva, where the man very kindly (and probably expensively) made me something called a “red eye,” which is the same as a “shot in the dark”—a cup of regular coffee with a shot of espresso. It was good! I was so astonished that he knew what that was. Anyway, we made our way back to that great 9Marks church and heard a FABULOUS sermon from Matthew 28:19-20. Just great. Then it was time to get to Delft, which was a bit challenging. There was indeed a direct trip we could have taken, but we would have had to wait a while. So Jim got us onto this 3-part trip, we made all of the connections, and we got to Delft about 3:30. We made our way to our great little hotel, gulped down some chocolate to keep us going, and booked it out to the Delft Porcelain Museum. I was expecting very little and so of course was blown away. We spent absolutely every minute we could, getting kicked out at 5:30. We did indeed get to see some factory activity, many videos, and tons of GORGEOUS stuff. Delftware is indeed mostly blue and white, but there are quite a few other colors that have been made at various times. So much fun! Now it was time for dinner, and I really wanted to make it back to that Greek place we’d gone last year. It was pretty cold and raining a bit, so we weren’t going to be eating out on the barge like we did last time. But there it was! And even though we didn’t have a reservation we were early enough that we got shoehorned in. I got my whole grilled fish again, which was so good. We even got back to the hotel in time for Jim to get himself onto the weekly Sunday Zoom meeting with the Simons family. Technology is a wonderful thing!

4/24 We had a couple of things we wanted to get to in Delft before going on to Bruges, so we’d gone ahead and booked breakfast in the hotel. It was okay, and it was very convenient. They very cheerfully let us leave our bags tucked away behind a couch in the reception area and we headed out for quite a day. The first thing on the agenda was that Vermeer Cultural Center that we’d spent all of half an hour in last year. Vermeer was born and lived his life in Delft, and his “View of Delft” is his only landscape/seascape painting. (“The Little Street” is his only other exterior painting.) We spent a l-o-n-g time there. It was great to be able to take all the time you wanted and get close, something you couldn’t do with the real paintings. (Not that that wasn’t an awesome experience too, of course.) After grabbing some lunch we headed for the “New Church,” which is really very old and which has the tombs of most members of the Dutch royal family; the latest funeral to take place there for them was Princess Juliana’s in 2006. (The royal crypt is not open to visitors, funnily enough.) It’s a long story as to why that tradition started. They have some great exhibits within the cathedral and so we stayed quite awhile. But we took note that our tickets were good for climbing the tower, so we decided to do that. My word! It was 366 steps—at least that’s what I think we were told—many/most of the stairs that horrible worn-down-in-the-middle stone type. My legs were really feeling it by the time we got down, but it was totally worth it. We decided that we’d better just get our bags and get to the train station so we wouldn’t get to Bruges too late, and thus started on an epic journey that involved four trains. We ran into a nice young woman from Tennessee who was traveling alone but visiting a friend in Leiden, so we (or rather she and Jim) formed an investigative unit and managed to get us there by dint of great difficulty in finding the correct platform(s). How people are supposed to know these things is a mystery to me. Well, we made it in spite of it all. And when we got to the train station in Bruges and saw the line of taxis—and Jim knew that the buses had stopped running—we just went ahead and took one, getting to this really quite charming VRBO place by about 9:00. We were exhausted!

4/25 Up and out this morning, but not before I made myself a very good cup of coffee, for free, in the VRBO’s kitchen. We then headed for a place called “Books and Brunch,” a café that also sells books, and had one of the stellar meals of the trip—and that’s saying something. Everything is made fresh, I had a huge bowl of granola with yogurt and fruit, Jim had something called the “extensive breakfast,” and then it was time to get to the Groeningemuseum, which seemed to be somewhat of a big deal especially for “Flemish Primitives.” Honestly, it was a great place—and I can’t even remember what put us onto it. We then headed for something called “The Basilica of the Sacred Blood,” which a fellow tenor in my choir had told me I had to see. Every day during certain hours they display a relic of a cloth soaked in the blood of Christ. It’s all taken quite seriously, with people filing by to see this crystal cylinder with jeweled golden endpieces and a separate container inside with the cloth. Men must remove their hats, you’re supposed to be quiet, and photos are not allowed.  We didn’t really have much time there, but at least we got in during the correct hours. We then got tickets for climbing the belfry but had to book a later slot as they allow only a limited number up at a time. So to fill in the gap we visited something called the “Historum,” which included a smaller tower of only 145 steps. Honestly, they’d done way more work than they needed to, with a lovely little film about how the model for one of the most famous paintings in the Groeningemuseum might have come to Brugges. Then we went back to the belfry tower with its (supposedly) 366 steps. I really didn’t find it all that difficult after the Delft tower. Then on to dinner at a classic Flemish restaurant, where we both were very happy with what we had. Because we were almost certainly going to miss the last bus, we caved in and took our second taxi of the trip. Ypres tomorrow!

4/26 Fortified ourselves at Brunch and Books, which ate up quite a bit of time but was well worth it. Getting to Yper (pronounced “EE-per” in Belgian, “EE-pers” in Fremch; I’m a little embarrassed at how I’ve been pronouncing it all these years-“eep-PRAY” with the French spelling “Yprès.”) Now, for some reason, they’ve changed the spelling to “Ieper,” which looks like “leper.” For a while I was thinking that there was a famous leper hospital there. Anyway, our trains weren’t very cooperative—I think we had to take two, so nothing like the Delft farrago, but ate up more time—so we didn’t get there until about 1:00. Jim had investigated going on a tour of the battlefields starting at 1:00 but they’d said they were “fully booked,” and we really wouldn’t have gotten there on time anyway. So we didn’t do an actual battlefield tour. Instead, we went to two museums, one focused entirely on WWI and really excellent. My Chorale friend had said that it was quite “sobering,” and indeed it was. I think he and his family did do a battlefield tour. The other museum was more focused on the whole history of Ieper/Yper and not just WWI, and it was good too. Anyway, we went for a walk around part of the “ramparts,” the old city walls, as had been suggested by a nice man at the train station, saw a small and very lovely cemetery, and then headed back to the station. Jim has been manfully dealing with the fact that Google and our Eurail Pass don’t always agree, either on times of departure or on platforms, and sometimes we have to just make an educated guess and go. So we ended up with a long wait at the station and decided to go get dinner as it was almost 7:00. Trusty Google led us to this lovely place looking out on a courtyard (and we all know what a sucker I am for courtyards). I got something that was a rather weird combo of flavors—sweet potatoes, green beans, and fish, all in a wrap. Jim ate half of it. I wouldn’t try to reproduce it myself, but it was good, and filling—and the wait staff were just great. We told them we had a train to catch and they hustled to get us our food. So when we caught our 8:15 train we weren’t starving and could just come home, indulgently taking a taxi from the station. So, so nice!

4/27 Brussels Day. We got there somewhere around mid-morning and got a rather mediocre breakfast at a place where they had these lovely sandwiches in the case that we weren’t able to order b/c it was before 11:00. I guess they need to keep them in stock for the lunch rush. Okay. We were headed to what we thought was our major target of opportunity, the big art museum, and we passed something called the “Museum of Chocolate.” Sounded good, so we went in. The woman at the counter said she could get us in even though we didn’t have reservations. It turned out to be very good and quite crowded, so we were lucky to have gotten there when we did. We even got free samples and a chocolate-making demo! It was great. On to the Royal Belgian House of Fine Art, or some such, first stopping briefly at a TinTin store, which was crawling with people. The museum is not quite the Louvre, but certainly in the same class. Some astonishing stuff. Also a nice supplemental “immersive” exhibit on Peter Breughl the Younger, called the “Breughl Box,” that went through about six of his major paintings in detail as they were projected on the wall. There was a great “fin de siècle” section in the basement, with a nice selection of my beloved Impressionists. They also have a whole Magritte section, really more than I cared to examine, but including some very famous ones. By the time I got to the “Old Masters,” including Rubens, I was pretty museumed out. It’s like eating a multi-course meal—you have to pace yourself. Anyway, I have no regrets for taking my time with the first stuff. It was getting on toward 5:00, so we decided to just get back to Brugge and get dinner there. Well, we ended up having one of the most spectacular meals of the trip at a little out-of-the-way place. My salmon was just great, as was Jim’s sea bream. There was a very different sauce for each one, so we asked for bread to sop it all up. Home to our last night in our VRBO, which has been great except for the incomprehensible shower. Believe me, the verse in Revelation about being lukewarm does not apply here—it’s either cold or hot. We watched a part of the Rick Steves video on Belgium just to reassure ourselves that we’d seen everything, which we pretty much had. Tomorrow is our last full day!

4/28 There was some kind of mixup about buses this morning (a very rare occurrence), so we ended up being almost half an hour late to our beloved Books and Brunch place, but we managed to beat the rush and get a table. I had the fabulous granola with yogurt and fruit again; Jim got the “extensive breakfast” again. Jim realized upon re-checking his train reservations that our super-duper Thalys train to Amsterdam was departing from Brussels, not Brugge, so we headed out the door in a bit of a hurry and made all of our connections. Got to our hotel by around 3:30, only to be told that they were experiencing some kind of tech issue and couldn’t let us check in. Also, the hotel bills itself as being “near the airport,” but you have to take a train to get there. Then you have this weird walk along a pathway. But hey! We had things to do, so we left our luggage in their storage room and headed back out into the city. I had gotten us tickets to a concert at the Concertgebouw, again in the balcony jump seats. We walked, got ice cream, and spent some time just peacefully sitting in the concert hall’s beautiful lobby, reading. I was feeling pretty tired, so I was afraid that I’d have a hard time staying awake. Well, the first notes from this young violinist Shin Sihan dispelled any thought of such a thing. My word! And the pianist! My double word! And then three others joined him for the second half of the program to perform a Korngold string quartet, and they were incredible. All very young and superbly talented. I hope they get the success they deserve in their careers, but a classical music gig is a pretty hard slog. If they ever show up in Denver we’ll go see them with no questions asked. Absolutely gorgeous, riveting stuff. I think my favorite piece was the first one, by the so-called “musical bad boy” avant-garde composer George Antheil, who at one point required the pianist to play a small drum and at another for the violinist to strum his violin like a guitar. We then needed to get back to our hotel, and Jim pulled off yet another “get to the bus stop two minutes before the bus arrives” master stroke, we took our train, and spent our last night of the trip in this quite luxurious room which we were too tired to appreciate.

4/29 Back to Denver! Nothing much to report here, except that my backpack was subjected to an excruciating search and re-search because they’d spotted my two (sealed and safe to travel) packages of cheese on the scanner but couldn’t seem to find them in the backpack itself. I didn’t realize that was the holdup and so was just standing and waiting, a little nervous that we might not make our connection. But—obviously—we did. It was a long, long day, but we’re now home. Jim caught a cold right there at the end, so he’s a little laid low—a very rare occurrence for him. And now we can’t wait to plan another trip!