Holland – My Final Day (8)

§ April 19th, 2014 § Filed under Holland § No Comments

Nieuw Kerk and Zaanse Schans – April 19

It’s my final day in Holland! Tomorrow we will be heading out of the hotel in the early morning to catch our 10:30 AM plane ride back to the States. We wanted to make sure we got as much as we could out of our entire visit, so we stuck in another day excursion to the small village of Zaanse Schans, which is about a 15 minute train ride from Amsterdam. Before heading out, though, we also needed to get some things done here in Amsterdam!

At 10:00 this morning, the Nieuw Kerk opened its doors. The church has been closed during our entire stay, but finally reopened yesterday with a photography exhibit in which my mom showed a lot of interest. Because we took our time at the market yesterday, we weren’t able to go see the church before its closing time at 5:00, so we made sure that we would stop by this morning before heading for the train. I wasn’t too excited or eager to go see the exhibit because it was featuring the finalists and winners of the World Press Photography competition. I don’t exactly know what I was thinking, or why I wasn’t interested, as I actually really liked the photojournalism I learned about last semester in my History of Photography class.

Many photojournalists were featured in the exhibit that spanned pretty much the entirety of the church. Subjects spanned from intimate documentation of children playing and monkeys mating, to violent depictions of hurricanes and human rights abuses. In the introduction to the exhibit, one of the main judges wrote that it was at first difficult to determine which images would progress to the finals – should the competition be based on aesthetics or topics/themes. In the end, the judges decided that the winning photographs should be visually compelling. If that meant that a picture of children playing would be displayed over an image of a child starving in Africa, purely based on the photojournalists framing and editing of the image, then that is how it would be.

Above are two of my favorite works from the exhibit. They both depict very powerful issues, but the composition of each of them is what evokes emotion or thought. I would definitely recommend reading about these specific pieces, the artists, and to look at other photographs from the exhibit. The above link to the World Press Photo website will allow you to do this.

In addition to photographs, the exhibit boasted multimedia and interactive displays. I watched two documentaries that focused on very different topics. The first is titled Calcio Storico, and follows men who play the traditional sport of Florentine soccer. The competition is fierce and can get very violent. The interviewees even mentioned that they don’t allow their mothers, wives, or children to come and watch them play in case they get killed on the field. The second documentary was 30 minutes long (as opposed to the first one being 10 minutes), and was titled Swan Song. This video was extremely emotional, and followed the lives of Marilyn, a 58 year old woman with early onset dementia, and her two daughters who had to take care of her. I’ve never seen how dementia manifests itself, and it was really heart-wrenching to see a woman, only 4 years older than my own mother, unable to live on her own and speak coherently.

We spent a lot longer at Nieuw Kerk than I had anticipated! It was mostly because we sat down to watch the videos, but because it was nearing noon, we didn’t get to look at everything on display. My mom wanted to take us to the Hollandsche Schouwburg before we got on the train. Before the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, this place functioned as a popular theatre. But once the Germans came in, they transformed the joyful venue into a holding camp for many of Amsterdam’s Jews. Now it stands as a museum and memorial for the Jews from Amsterdam who died in the Holocaust. We had already visited the Jewish Historical Museum, the Portuguese Synagogue, and the Anne Frank House, so I really didn’t feel like going to another place with the same information. For some reason, there was a lack of English on the walls, and that, coupled with the fact that I really didn’t want to be there, made the museum quite unimpressive. It was an unnecessary detour from our day trip to Zaanse Schans.

The way my mom describes Zaanse Schans is as follows: a historic town, like the Old Bethpage Village Restoration, but where people actually live. If you don’t know what Old Bethpage is, it is a historic village in which people dress up and demonstrate how American colonists would have lived. I wouldn’t say that people were exactly dressed up at Zaanse Schans, but some of the shop keepers were, and there definitely were demonstrations about cheese making, chocolate making, and the like. The area is very quaint, with small green houses topped with white gables. There were 8 windmills, and some of them were even working! The wind was blowing quite hard, and I wonder if the movement of the sails created even more gusts.

It was about lunchtime when we got to the town, a ten minute walk from the Zaandijk train station. While looking for food, we stumbled upon a small art gallery called Het Weefhuis. Luckily, there was a bathroom there AND some chocolates, both of which would carry us over until we could find real food and enter the actual tourist attraction town. It turns out that every windmill/”museum” had food in it! I put museum in quotes because there was no real information about anything anywhere. Like I said, it’s mostly a tourist attraction and a quaint place to take pictures – we saw two couples (a marriage couple and perhaps a prom couple) all dressed up and taking photographs. We ate waffles at the bakery, ice cream at the cheese place, and a specula cookie at the spice mill. Earlier, when asking at an expensive restaurant if there was any food in the area, she said no. What a lie!

We spent around three and a half hours at Zaanse Schans, and then headed back to Amsterdam to end our day. It is still early, as it is only 6:00 right now. Malka and Mom went to the shops on the way back from the train station, while I came back to the hotel. Later on, I guess we’ll go out for our last dinner in Amsterdam. I find it’s always sad to leave a traveling destination, but I’m sure I’ll be back one day!