Use-Me-Ums, or, Musing About Museums

Long, long ago, when my newlywed niece Alissa was about four years old, she told me all about the Science Use-me-um she had visited recently. When I tried to correct her - "No, Lissy. That's a MUseum, not a USE-meum," - she looked at me like I was crazy, shook her head, and insisted she was right. You never know which of those adorable (when uttered by a child), or just plain odd (when uttered by anyone else) family sayings or mis-sayings will become a part of your family folklore, but this one stuck with us. Peter and I still ask each other, after visits to a museum, "How did you like that usemeum?" 

I have visited many museums in the six months I have lived in Amsterdam. This is a city brimming with both grand, tourist-lined museums, and small, out-of-the-way ones that you can whip through in an hour. This week, I'll take you along to some of my favorites, and maybe whet your appetite for visiting some in person. Just a word about visiting museums: there are, no doubt, some of us who begin to yawn uncontrollably at even the mention of the word museum. It just sounds musty and boring, the way it rolls sleepily out of your mouth. I have many memories of going into New York City as a kid with my mom - who grew up there and instantly began walking at a NYC clip as soon as we got off the train from N.J. She literally left us Vine kids in the dust as she cantered up Broadway towards one museum or another. At some point in my life, I stopped thinking of a museum as just the necessary evil I had to live through before I could enjoy the good parts: the visit to the gift shop, and, of course, the lunch that I needed to bring me out of my museum coma. At some point, I actually began to enjoy the museum part of the journey. So, thank you mom, for paving the way for my move to Amsterdam by teaching me to appreciate a fine museum. 

Museums have served an important role in my adjustment to life in Amsterdam. For one, they got me out and about on rainy days, which are...most days. Second, visiting a museum was a good activity choice when I didn't know anyone here. You can stroll around a museum in a crowd and no one knows you are there alone. Finally, museums have been a good "date" activity as I get to know people here. You can meet up and visit a museum and you instantly have a topic of conversation: what you are looking at! I have visited museums with groups from the American Women's Club and The International Women's Club of Amsterdam and through those groups now have an informal group of friends who like to visit museums when we can fit them into our "busy" schedules. The Van Gogh Museum seems to have gotten wise to the concept of museum as pick-up spot, hosting Friday night museum visits, complete with cocktails and music. So you can go with a date, or find one there, all while looking at some amazing art. http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/friday-nights/about-the-friday-nights.  

This sticker kind of sums up my life right now. What better time in life to get caught up on my museum-tripping?

Spotted in a café on one of my many coffee breaks. Having loads of alone time is also an important ingredient for getting your museum muscles in shape.

I think of the museums here as fitting into three groups: 1. The "Big Three" must-sees that are on all the tourist to-do lists: The Van Gogh Museum, The Anne Frank House, and The Rijksmuseum (the large Metropolitan Museum-like treasure trove with something for everyone); 2. The less well-known gems like The Hermitage, The Resistance Museum (tells the story of the Dutch Resistance during WW II) and The Amsterdam Museum (the history of Amsterdam); and 3. The "only in Amsterdam" museums like The Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum, The Sexmuseum, The Amsterdam Cheese Museum, and The Amsterdam Tulip Museum.

I'll start with the last category. I haven't visited any of them, but I would hazard a guess that many tourists to Amsterdam would not consider it a real visit to Amsterdam unless they had visited at least two. One can only imagine what the gift stores are like in the Marijuana and Sex Museums. Do they give out free samples? I'm more interested in the samples from the Cheese Museum, truth be told. I welcome any visitors who want to visit any of these fine repositories of Amsterdam culture. I may just wait for you outside. 

When it comes to the category of tucked away, less-traveled museums, I can weigh in. The Hermitage is the Amsterdam wing of the grand older sister that is found in St. Petersburg, Russia. Our Hermitage was built to display all of the many treasures that can't fit into the Russian site. Last month, I saw the exhibit Dining With the Tsars, which included many of the porcelain dishes that the Tsars used when entertaining, which was a constant with those folks. The exhibit was like a giant display of porcelain porn. You felt like you were a guest of the Tsars for the afternoon. The magic worked for me, until the clock struck 5 and I had to walk out into the rain for my return home, just like all the other plebes out on the streets. 

Sorry if dishes aren't your thing, but I just love this stuff.

Alright, this one doesn't hail from the Tsars, but it is from the first time I hosted the American Women's Club book group at my house. I hadn't put the peacocks out yet. 

Last week, I finally made my way to the Resistance Museum, the Verzetsmuseum, with my museum buddies Darlene and Rebecca. The museum pulls you into the narrative of the Dutch response to the German occupation during WW II by asking you to decide as you look: would you adapt, collaborate, or resist? Amsterdam was not a good place to be if you were Jewish during WW II. Nevertheless, this small museum does tell the important story of the pockets of resistance that were here. There was also a very moving exhibit about the Hunger Winter of 1945, when 40,000 children were evacuated from urban areas to foster families on farms, to save them from starvation. If you visit with children, there is a Junior Museum which looks wonderful. I did find myself wishing I could bring last year's class of 5th graders to visit. That would have been quite an expensive field trip!

This display explains why some Dutch people don't have a fond association with the beautiful tulips that are a symbol of The Netherlands. I learned that some people were so hungry, they resorted to eating tulip bulbs during the Hunger Winter. 

This week, my museum buddies and I traveled to the smallest museum I have visited here. It's the Mutatuli Huis. To be honest, we picked it mostly because it was pouring and wind-swept that day, and we wanted a place that would get us out of the rain. Sometimes, that's all it takes in order to find an undiscovered treasure.  

This tiny little museum, tucked away off the Herengracht (a canal), teaches you about the life of the Dutch writer Multatuli. His novel Max Havelaar is compared, on the museum website, to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The novel is read in higher level high school literature classes here. Multatuli tells the story of a young boy named Max, but is also highly critical of the Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia. The literature graduate student who showed us around the museum pointed out the collection of Charles Dickens novels on Mutatuli's shelves, another writer to whom Multatuli is often compared. When a Dutch woman showed up and joined our three person personal tour, she told us she had read Max Havelaar in high school. She had the same reaction my daughter Rachel had to reading Dickens' Hard Times at Columbia High School: it was not the best of times; it was the worst of times. We really enjoyed our visit to this museum, even though we had never heard of the writer. Apparently, he was one of Freud's favorite writers and the Society of Dutch Literature proudly named him the most important Dutch writer of all time.

Here is Multatuli's house. In case you are as confused as we were about the Italian-sounding name, it is not his given name. He was born Eduard Douwes Dekker, a fine Dutch-sounding name. He gave himself the pseudonym Multatuli from the Latin for "I have suffered much", which referred both to himself, and to the injustices he saw when he was in Indonesia. 

I like this idea of his. It really puts things in perspective:

VIEWED FROM THE MOON
WE ARE ALL THE SAME SIZE.

From the smallest museum to the largest: The Rijksmuseum. It's the national museum of the Netherlands, and it just underwent a renovation and rebuilding that took ten years (so we timed our move here just perfectly). The Rijks is known for its sweeping panorama of Dutch art, including some uber-famous Rembrandts and Vermeers, their huge collection of  blue and white Delft pottery, and for the great acoustics in the tunnel that runs right through the museum, as this next musician can testify to. 

Here's a photo that Peter took of the Rijksmuseum before I arrived in Amsterdam. This week, on March 3 to be exact, I celebrated my six month anniversary here. Now I can stop measuring my stay in months. Expats tend to describe their time here the way new parents do with their first child. When anyone asks, "How old is he?", you respond with precision, "He's 9 weeks today," or, "He'll be 5 months old on Thursday." Once you hit the six-month mark, you start to realize that no one really wants to know anything with such exactitude, except you. So I am sure I was the only one who carefully took note of my six month anniversary here.

I mentioned the young musician in the video in a previous post on music. Let's just say that no amount of excellent acoustics would make me sound anything like this six year old. I have been to the Rijksmuseum several times, both on my own, and with guided groups with other ladies from the American Women's Club, and the International Women's Club. The guides have been fabulous, and more than make up for the gaping wide hole in my knowledge of art history. I should've taken that college course after all! Going to museums regularly is easily done here with my trusty Museumkaart. For 60 euros a year (just over $66) you get into museums here and throughout the Netherlands. There is something so nice about flashing your badge/card as you walk in. You really feel like a native.

My last museum tip is about the Van Gogh Museum. It was closed for several years for renovations, and has been gussied up with gorgeous paint produced by Peter's company, Akzo Nobel. In fact, you can now purchase the colors and paint your house in Sun Yellow, Iris Blue, and Bedroom Red. In addition to repainting the walls, the museum also changed the focus of the museum. The curators wanted museum-goers to realize that Van Gogh painted so many masterpieces in spite of his mental illness, not as a result of it. In other words, his genius did not spring forth out of his madness. Rather, he struggled mightily to stay productive even when he was ill. They have also included paintings by other artists, to show you both who influenced Van Gogh's style, and who he in turn influenced. I appreciated these changes to the museum's focus.

These are the actual paints he painted with. Amazing! 

Needless to say, a photo doesn't do justice to what you will see if you come in person. I saved up my first visit for when friends came to visit. Thanks, Brooke and Eric, for a lovely couple of hours. As I recall, you were here during Boston Blizzard #1. No wonder you were so intrigued by these paintings! Little did you know then that the late January storm would just be the first of your oh-so-many blizzards.  

The most difficult thing about visiting the Van Gogh Museum, other than the fact that there is usually a line, is learning how to pronounce the name correctly. In Woody Allen's movie Manhattan, Diane Keaton actually pronounces it almost correctly, although the character Woody Allen plays finds her pronunciation incredibly pretentious. "Van Gogh? Like an Arab she said it," he complains later. Actually, Woody, she was just trying to pronounce it like a Dutch person.

So by now, you need to put your feet up after all of the museums you have visited today. As I think back to the word use-me-um constructed by my niece, I realize it's not so far off the mark. A museum is a place you use: to help you get to know a city, to help you meet new friends, and to help add a little culture to your life. I've really enjoyed the usemeums here, and look forward to adding to my repetoire in the months ahead, both in and outside of Amsterdam. As the weather gets nicer, I can get my museum fix just by walking around the neighborhoods (buurts) here. It's like a giant open-air museum outside, just waiting for me to show my card to enter. 

Here is beautiful-in all-ways Alissa at age 27, on her wedding day in October. She has clearly moved on with her life, while we still cling to the expressions she used as a toddler. Anyway, thanks, Lissy, for inspiring this blog post. 

And just because it's a great song, here's Bill Withers singing Use Me. Or is he? Listen carefully: is he really saying, "Use-me-um"?