Ken@Japan

The Capital of the Netherlands is Amsterdam but the governmental buildings including the Royal Residence is based in The Hague or Den Haag, the third largest city in the nation. In Amsterdam museum I visited on Day 2, I realized that some of the masterpieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer were placed in Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. I therefore decided to visit there for…the most famous painting to me by Vermeer; Girl with a Pearl Earring. Mauritshuis, the house for Maurits Mauritshuis was originally built in the middle of 17th century as a mansion for Johan Maurits van Nassau, the stadtholder for the Dutch Colonial Empire in Brazil, who came from a collateral family of the Royal Bloodline. Years later, the huis was renovated to a museum in 1822 for art collections possessed mainly by the last Dutch stadtholder Willem V and his son, Willem I-the first King of the Netherlands. The museum itself is not that huge like the one in Amsterdam but possesses three originals by Vermeer out of the ...

One of the eye-catching sceneries in the Netherlands is a windmill. Green glass fields with windmills and goats/cows. It could be a Dutch traditional scene we would imagine. From Amsterdam, we can go to a traditional village called Zaanse Schans; it takes 30 minutes or so by train from Amsterdam Central station. Well, on my Day 4, I decided to visit there. But it wasn’t only me but also other foreign travelers to do so. Like a part of Kyoto, Zaanse Schans has been well developed for sightseeing purpose: there were souvenir shops, restaurants and attractions. The windmills, some of them were out of operation and we needed to pay an admissions for active ones. Of course, the active windmills were a lure for travelers. My first target was to experience the windmill but the clouded travelers staying in a long queue to admission made me skip the windmill first and re-route to the museum. Zaandam, the history of Dutch Indusrialization Zannse museum was not like the one in Amsterdam, where fa...

The Royal Palace was full of antique furnitures and arts. Like the museum I visited on Day 2, I spent several hours to observe the exhibitions; I needed to stay in queune for some rooms/decorations in restricted areas due to some safety reasons (they are used by the Royal familiy when they have some national guests and it should be kept safe).  The result: I really enjoyed the palace but starved when I left. The lunch time came. Traditional pancake It’s quite new knowledge for me to learn that a pancake originates in the Netherlands. Technically, the pancake-like food has been popular in Europe since the ancient Roman time, but the Dutch elevated it to its traditional cuisine called “pannenkoek”. Immigrants brought the pannenkoek on their way to America, and it was shaped to the one we see as an American pancake at present. If I hear the word “pancake”, I would rather think it is a sweat American one; it’s too sugary and sweetened. I’d visited a Hawaiian pancake café in Japan and h...

On Day 3, I went to the Dutch Royal Palace in the central area in Amsterdam. I don’t know why but I’ve been interested in a court culture in Europe since I was a boy. I majored in European history for my bachelor and got interested in a complex of European history dynamics: from a dynasty to a dynasty, from monarchy to republic, from Roman empire to the Catholic world. Among them, the court culture which was kind of a nest to the classical arts and music we are still enjoying sparks my curiosity; as a Patron, they supported various artists and many masterpieces were born with some financial backup from noble/high-class families. The monarch and its family in European countries were also great supports to the beautiful arts. Moses' Room, the abdication of throne Usually, the new Monarch appears followed by the former Monarch passed away, e.g. the King Charles III of Britain was enthroned followed by death of his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II. That said, for the Dutch Royal Fam...

The Netherlands bore varous artists throughout the history and Rijskmuseum has a lot of collections by those Dutch genius. I'd known several masterpieces by Vermeer but I also came to know Rembrandt from reading a Japanese book called " Gairo-wo-yuku（街路をゆく ）" or "Walking the road" by a famous Japanese writer Shiba Ryotaro (司馬遼太郎 1923-1996) . Shiba is famous for historical novels but he also travelled around the world and left a series of travel essays. He'd been to the Netherlands twice in 1980s in the middle of the Cold War and wrote about his experiences in one of the essays.  In his book, he mentioned his enthusiasm to Rembrandt's paintings, which sparked my curiosity. Fortunately,  Rijskmuseum has the genuine "Night Watch", one of the famous paintings by Rembrandt, about which Shiba intensively mentioned in his book. The "Night Watch" was under its renovation work; it was hung in a renovation room in the museum's oval room. We...

You can refer back to the previous articles: ・ Day1 Good Morning, Amsterdam! I didn’t remember when I fell asleep in a hostel. Upon a long flight with some nervousness in a place unknown to me, I was tired to have a deep sleep. I woke up at 2 am in the middle of night, realizing I was a bit sweaty so I took a shower. Well, the water was too cold and didn’t come out of the shower head enough. Like a stream in woods, I needed to scoop up the water with hands. I managed to wash my fair and body somehow but I felt a bit cold, so I went directly back to my bed to get myself warm. I fell asleep without noticing again and regained consciousness at 7 am.  Day 2 began with breakfast search: I should have bought groceries to cook breakfast in the kitchen last night…. Anyways, I put my valuables with my Nikcon D750 SRL inherited by my late father into my daily bag and walked into the downtown of Amsterdam. Into a breakfast journey April 27 was Sunday, so the city wasn’t that busy in the morni...

The cheapest flight from Japan to Europe is via China in most cases. I flied with C hina Eastern Airline  from Osaka to Pudong Airport and then to Amsterdam. The transit time was just for 1.5 hours at Pudong so I had to rush to the transit process: the arrival dock was a bit far from the transit reception where all of the international transit passengers should pass the passport control and security check. I'm usually carrying a backpack with me without baggage check-in, in which the whole belongings are packed for the entire trip, so I'm a bit nervous for passing my bag into the X-ray to be checked by insepctors anytime. Well,  if they find mines suspicious, I have to open it and show the whole packed items to them: simply, it would be wasting time. This time: all clear, nothing happened. First encounter I'd bought an e-sim for my mobile networking in the Netherlands, so I turned on my smartphone and checked the Google map to map out the route I would take to my hostel whe...