Crochet...and some knitting

Look what was on the wall of the apartment I first stayed in in Amsterdam:



An extremely accomplished crochet art piece. At first sight it seemed rather threatening, but over time I found it comforting. It's a piece of art that relies on expert craft skills for its achievement - something I admire. One day I visited the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam to see an exhibition titled Hand Made - an exhibition of beautiful Dutch craft objects across many centuries that implicitly posed the question of what constitutes craft, and what art. I found this piece in the exhibition:



Clearly, it's by the same artist as the piece in my exchange apartment, though this time it's two female figures titled 'Twins'. The artist's name is Johanna Schweizer. She's now 65 but has only recently gained a reputation for her wonderful work.

This was also in my first Amsterdam apartment:



The apartment had a number of teddy bear themed art pieces or objects, but this must have been the original one. I asked my house exchanger about it and apparently the bib was knitted by his mother when he was a baby. A great design in typical Dutch colours.

Some random knitted and crocheted objects from my travels:



Top row, left:
Crocheted rugs for sale in a very trendy vintage / recycled store in Haarmemmerstraat

Top row, right:
Exhibit in the Rijksmuseum - woollen caps worn by Dutch whalers, discovered in 1980 by archeologists investigating the burial places of 185 Dutch whalers who had died near Spitsbergen during the seventeenth century.The skeletons were still wearing their knitted woollen caps. Each cap was individualised and the museum information claims that the men recognised one another only by the pattern of stripes on their caps as they were bundled up so tightly against the fierce cold that only their eyes were visible.

Bottom row, left
Phone cover made by Meian (ravelry name) of the De Pijp knitting group in Amsterdam. I've forgotten the name of the technique she used, so if you're reading this, Meian, can you please remind me?

Bottom row, right
Crocheted car. This one's for Jane (and Connor)

And finally, a frieze of knitted mice (at least, I think they're mice. Maybe they're not. Maybe they're something from popular culture of which I'm completely unaware) decorating a very upmarket shop in Antwerp. There must have been at least 30 of them, each one individualised.



Lots of these pieces are quite inspirational. Clearly, knitting and crochet can be used in creative, individual, and appealing ways.

Two neighbourhoods

I'm such a fan of house exchanging. I've been able to stay in Amsterdam for six weeks with no accommodation expenses other than those for the couple of days I spent in Belgium. But beyond the obvious economic reasons for house exchanging it also enables you to have all the amenities of 'home' (such as laundry facilities) and gives you access to neighbourhoods with an immediacy that's not possible when you stay in a hotel - much as I love staying in hotels!

I've had two different houses - the first for most of my time in an area of Amsterdam called De Pijp, and the last week and a bit in an old canal house on the Brouwersgracht canal. I've enjoyed making comparisons between the neighbourhoods. De Pijp is south from the old centre of Amsterdam - just outside the central canal ring. The area was developed during the 1920s when Amsterdam experienced significant expansion. De Pijp is reputed to be one of the most multi-cultural areas of Amsterdam and, like many such areas, is rapidly gentrifying. My swap apartment was part of a block that was originally developed by the Catholic Church. There is a large church on one corner - still used as a church and with frequent, very tuneful church bells - but the remainder of the buildings on the block which had once housed a school and convent are now used for other purposes. My apartment had been developed from what had once been the convent, and around the corner there was a hotel, the police station, and some kind of community services building. One of the things I like about Amsterdam is the way blocks of buildings house a variety of functions.



'My' apartment was the top two floors of the central part of the building in the photo above, with the small windows under the eaves and the windows in the attic roof. The tower in the photograph also belongs to the apartment, but I took one look at the stairs you needed to climb to the top of the tower and decided it was picturesque but needed no further exploration. Below is part of the large, light-filled living area with its great art and somewhat quirky, Dutch-designed furniture:



The bedroom was in the attic upstairs. (Don't get me started on Dutch stairs...I will go on forever. They go on forever...steep, narrow, scary.)

About twenty metres from the apartment there was a tram stop to go to the city centre or to the Museumplein and Concertgebouw. I loved the trams. And everything I needed was nearby - a couple of supermarkets, restaurants, good coffee or lunch shops and a very beautiful flower stall:




When Amsterdam is promoted to tourists the emphasis is always on the picturesque inner city area bounded by the old, semi-circular canals. One can understand why this is so. It's a manageable area for people who have only one or two days to spend in the city and the buildings, streets and canals provide lots of memorable experiences and photographs. But I've enjoyed the opportunity to experience Amsterdam outside this area. The canal network extends beyond the old canals and most parts of Amsterdam are only a few blocks from one of the canals. In De Pijp I had only to walk a block to be at the Amstelkanaal



where one can stroll along the canal side and watch the boats and ducks and people taking advantage of the brief winter sunshine. In a city that's so very densely populated and where people live in comparatively small spaces the canals open up the landscape and provide some sense of contact with nature.

One of the reasons you go to Amsterdam is the architecture - or at least, that's one of the main reasons for me. The streets and canals of old seventeenth century buildings are very pleasing, and I've already written about the ingenious ways in which, for several centuries, the Dutch have integrated newer architectural styles within a seventeenth century scale. The rapid expansion of Amsterdam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century brought a new flurry of architecture that produced some of the grand buildings of Amsterdam - Centraal Station, the Concertbebouw concert hall and the Rijksmuseum:



But the 1920s also produced what's become known as the Amsterdam School of Architecture. A few blocks from where I was staying in De Pijp is a complex of buildings called De Dageraad, designed by renowned architect Piet Kramer and built in the early 1920s. Like other Dutch architects of this time Kramer was inspired by the socialist ideal of making housing for the poor that was functional and aesthetically pleasing. He built in brick, but was concerned to provide flowing lines and detail that expressed character. Needless to say, few of the 'poor' could any longer afford to live in these buildings.




I've really fallen for the Amsterdam School of Architecture and have been planning in my mind an itinerary that would visit most of its major achievements!

For my last week or so in Amsterdam I moved to an exchanged apartment on the Brouwersgracht canal. My last post demonstrated how this allowed me to watch the Queensday canal spectacle. This is the seventeenth century house I lived in:



'My' apartment is behind the three windows at the top of the central building and the attic windows. Again, lots of even steeper, even narrower stairs. The Dutch people describe themselves as thrifty, and I've decided Dutch stairs are the ultimate expression of this thrift. When you live in small spaces, stairs are wasted space and must be confined to as small a space as possible. This was my living room, looking towards the canal-side windows:



and these are the views to the right and the left from the windows:





This apartment is in a very beautiful old part of town and on the tourist track, with canal tours routinely passing by. It is also just around the corner from the very trendy Haarlemmerstraat, which is a mixture of quirky boutiques, the latest in organic or 'biologische' food and responsible fair trade clothes, vintage furniture, revamped and recycled clothes, and food from all around the world. It was also just a few blocks along one of the most beautiful canals in Amsterdam from the Noordermarkt on Saturdays and Mondays - a great place to browse and shop for bargains, and home to very trendy and well-patronised cafes:



If I were going to live in Amsterdam I think I might prefer the relative calm of De Pijp, though I've also enjoyed the busy beauty of living on one of the most beautiful canals. I feel very fortunate to have had both of these experiences. I've now also met both my exchange partners and liked them very much. Maybe we'll have more exchange opportunities in the future.

By the way, for those who are interested, I've used www.homeforexchange.com to organise my house exchanges and have found it most satisfactory.

Queensday in Amsterdam

I'm almost at the end of my time in Amsterdam and I've been busy trying to cram in visits and events that a few weeks ago I seemed to have so much time to see. Then, because I've been busy, which inevitably means lots of walking, I've been tired in the evenings. Blogging has suffered, so my post on Queensday is a bit late as the day itself was last Tuesday. But I did want to write something about it because it was such an Event (with a capital E).

Queensday celebrates the Queen's birthday. Well, it celebrated the past Queen's birthday. Now that the Netherlands has a new King it will be Kingsday and from now on will be celebrated on his real birthday - 27 April. This year it was also the day that Queen Beatrix abdicated from the throne and that the installation of the new King Willem-Alexander was celebrated. Some thoughts on that later.

Queensday is rather amazing for an outsider. It's partly a massive garage sale, partly a street party to which everybody is invited, and generally an occasion for much good-natured, noisy, letting your hair down. Everybody dresses in orange (because the Dutch royal family comes from the House of Orange); t-shirts, hats, feather boas, or sometimes whole suits. Early in the morning people set up tables or lay out blankets in the street with whatever is to hand - clothing, toys, bric-a-brac, cupcakes, orange juice, apple pie and (occasionally) handmade craft items. Many of the stalls are managed by children and most items are sold for just a few euros.



Some of the residents just set up tables and chairs by the canal and spent the day having a long, crowded, noisy, boozy picnic in the street:



This last week or so I've been staying in a house on the Brouwersgracht canal and so I had an excellent view of the activities on the canal. Pottering along the canals in whatever kind of boat is available seems to be a popular Amsterdam activity, particularly at the weekend. On Queensday, taking to the canals on a boat increases a hundred fold.



Some of the boats seemed quite civilised, with family members, dogs, pots of coffee and the inevitable apple cake. But most were crammed full of people, dancing (yes, dancing), drinking, and with music blaring so loud that the panes in the old windows of my house constantly vibrated. I kept waiting for someone to fall overboard, or for 'canal rage' to develop as the boats waited to pass under the narrow bridge at the end of my street, but none of this happened.



Despite the chaos and noise it all seemed very happy and good-natured. Afterwards, the mayor reported that there had been no misadventures on the day, other than the arrest of two republicans who were protesting against the King's installation, and even then the policeman who carried out the arrest was required to apologise to the people arrested and reportedly take them a bouquet of flowers. The Dutch take their flowers very seriously.

In the lulls between jostling my way through the streets and anticipating disaster for the boats in the canals I watched the abdication and installation on television. As the commentary was in Dutch I could only watch and deduce and wonder about the goings-on. In comparison with British royal events, it all seemed low-key and much more affectionate and personal. To begin with, Queen Beatrix, like her mother before her, had chosen to abdicate to have a monarch whose world-view is more resonant with the current zeitgeist. The abdication was a simple ceremony in which Beatrix signed a document which was then witnessed by the king and queen to be and members of the parliamentary cabinet. There were misted eyes, fond glances between the queen and her son and daughter-in-law and hugs and kisses.

Later, the ceremony in which the king was installed was very straightforward (even though he wore a rather magnificent ermine cloak and the new queen had a very sparkly diamond and sapphire tiara.) Essentially the new king gave a speech and then he and the members of parliament swore to uphold the laws of the land or some such. Everything is much simpler when it has no religious component. The old queen, now again a princess, sat with her three small, blond grand-daughters and again the informality and fondness of their relationship was evident.

I was fascinated by the dress code - or lack thereof - for the event. Some of the male parliamentarians - particularly those of the left - turned up in open-neck shirts and informal jackets. Some of the women wore pants or simple dresses. Others had taken the opportunity to dress up with grand hats (the women) and morning suits (the men). The grander guests must have received clearer instructions. The princes and princesses from other countries, such as Charles and Camilla and 'our Mary' from Denmark, were quite formal, with the women in long gowns and hats - a rather odd combination not called for by many occasions. The numerous women of the Dutch royal family, aunts and first cousins, also wore hats and long gowns, but they also had trains to their dresses. I imagine there must have been lots of phone calls and emails to check what each other was wearing.

I thought it was a successful combination of ceremony and informality. As one of my Dutch friends who is a republican said, the current royal family are so successful in building a relationship with their people that they make it hard to be a republican in the Netherlands.

And of course, the flowers for the occasion were wonderful.

More tulips - and daffodils and hyacinths

I've been dithering about when to visit the Keukenhof gardens outside Amsterdam. The gardens are world-famous for their Spring display of tulips but as winter has been longer and colder than usual the tulips are flowering later than usual. There doesn't seem to be a 'state of the tulips' advice site (or if there is I haven't found it) to guide me in choosing the best time to visit so it's all been a bit of a punt.

Eventually I chose to visit on Wednesday this week which fortuitously was the warmest day there has so far been this year. Next week is my last week in Amsterdam and is a week of holidays and celebration for the installation of the new king, so I tried to avoid that week as I imagine there'll be lots of tourists and even locals making excursions around Amsterdam. (By the way, my Dutch friend Mieke tells me Keukenhof is just for the tourists, but that's OK because I'm a tourist).

I loved Keukenhof, though my visit was a lesson in limiting what you desire. Most of the millions of tulips are still in bud and I found myself thinking 'if only I'd waited another week or so'. But this week was the peak period for the daffodils and hyacinths and they would not have been so splendid next week. And anyway, by the end of the day even my tulip desires were satiated. What I found most wonderful about the gardens was the sense of abundance. The planting is dense and generous.

The hyacinths seemed very luxurious. Their scent was intoxicating:




The daffodils were often planted in beautifully neat lines and defined and divided spaces:




And even though there are many more tulips to come, how could they be more beautiful?



There were splendid massed displays of a single type of flower, but some of my favourite garden beds were those that combined different flowers. Not subtle, but wonderful:



Keukenhof has something for everyone. There are majestic trees just covered in a haze of green from their new Spring leaves, winding paths, neatly aligned geometric gardens, trees covered in blossom, lakes, bridges, fountains, sculptures and, miraculously, given the crowds, lots of benches on which to rest and just contemplate the flowers.

In Bruges (or Brugge or Bruggen)

I think Bruges has been near the top of my travel list ever since I've had a travel list, but for one reason or another I'd never managed to visit. Finally, I've been to Bruges.



My mental picture of Bruges was disrupted in 2008 by Martin McDonough's witty, shocking, politically incorrect film, 'In Bruges' The images of mellow brick and stone buildings, towers, spires and winding cobbled streets and squares was overlaid by the dark, threatening edginess of the film. Now I've been in Bruges myself I know that making Bruges seem grim and dangerous is probably McDonagh's greatest ironic achievement. In reality it is the city of mellow late medieval buildings and charming streets that I'd imagined. As I read somewhere (can't remember where - my brain is suffering overload) 'if Bruges didn't exist, Walt Disney would have invented it'.

The belfry that becomes so threatening in the film presides protectingly over a square filled with tourists, cafes, horse-drawn carriages and school tour groups. The dark colonnaded building that was so menacing in the film turned out to be the nineteenth century fishmarket where fish are still sold each weekday morning.




It was fun to see how Bruges had been transformed by McDonagh's black humour. Also, my appreciation of the film has increased by seeing what Bruges 'really' is like. I must watch it again.

The small city is lovely. Even hordes of tourists can't undermine its charm. The hotel at which I stayed added to my enjoyment. It was a sixteenth century heritage building where I had a tiny but comfortable and perfectly equipped room that had once been part of the servant's quarters:



This was the view from my room:



and this was the canal just around the corner from the hotel:



Near the centre of town there are, inevitably, many souvenir and tourist-oriented shops. And the main souvenirs? Chocolate and lace. I've been seduced away from chocolate by Dutch preferences for marzipan and caramel flavours, but I was interested in the lace. I'd been warned that most of the lace in the shops is now mass-produced - and that most of it is sourced from China. This makes rather sad sense. Few tourists would be willing to pay anything like the real cost of producing handmade lace. But I had read of a lace museum and of a shop attached to the museum so I meandered through what I imagine are the back streets of Bruges to find the museum. Any walk through Bruges is lovely, except for the impact on your feet from the cobbles.



The museum building and its setting were charmingly low-key. You buy a ticket for 3 euros and it gives you entry to the rather gloomy fifteenth century Jerusalem Church, in whose outbuildings the museum is located, to the museum itself and to a demonstration of lace-making. A miscellaneous job-lot. This is the outside of the unpretentious museum:



Most of the lace in the beautifully plain rooms of the museum is exquisite - fine, unique designs, astonishing craft. Unfortunately, the labeling is most inadequate (even worse if your Flemish is as undeveloped as mine) and provides little guidance as to the history or techniques of the pieces. You just have to admire them as objects. I so enjoyed watching the demonstration of lace-making, which was really just three women making lace and chatting to one another as if it was their weekly get-together.



They were clearly very very skilled, but it was good to see them get distracted from time to time by the conversation and have to unpick a few rows (or whatever the bits fastened by pins are called in lace-making). I was directed to a shop, called 't Apostelientje, up the cobbled lane beside the church.



I'm still not sure if it was officially the museum shop, but it was crammed with pieces of hand-made lace - collars, handkerchiefs, tablecloths and napkins, doilies - both antique and modern, as well as all the bobbins, threads, patterns and other materials you need for lace-making.



I can't imagine I would ever want to make bobbin-lace, but I was overcome with admiration for the traditions and skill involved in this form of textile production. And even if I could have afforded it, I wouldn't have bought any of the lovely pieces in the shop as they are part of a life I don't live. But I couldn't resist buying some small scraps and samples of lace just so I could have examples of the craft.



Bruges (or Brugge or Bruggen) is still on my travel list. I want to visit again.

Antwerp - 5 reasons to visit

I've been to Belgium for a few days and spent a day and a bit in Antwerp. There are many reasons to visit Antwerp. There's beer, and chocolate, and diamonds, and lots to see if you're a fan of Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens or if you're an aficionado of busy river ports. But none of these feature in my top 5 in Antwerp.

1 Antwerpen Centraal Station.
Of course I'm not suggesting you stay too long at Central Station, but I do recommend a few awe-struck minutes as you pass through.



The main station edifice (and it really is an edifice) was built in 1905 in what my guide book describes as no recognisable single style of architecture. It's simply grand, impressive even over-bearing. It's a cathedral to rail transport, built at a time when Antwerp was a major transportation hub for northern Europe. I was very impressed!



2 The Grote Markt
This is Antwerp's grand central square, surrounded by show-off late sixteenth century buildings. There's a row of guildhouses, shiny with gilt, each constructed to demonstrate the power and influence of the guilds of the time:



Nowadays the square has many cafes and restaurants and you can sit with a glass of wine (as I did in my warm coat, knitted hat and scarf) and contemplate the grandeur of the buildings, in particular the grand Stadhuis - Town Hall.



It's particularly interesting to travel the relatively short distance from Amsterdam to Antwerp - two such influential cities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - and to note the differences in the architecture of the time: from Calvinist Amsterdam's neat, discreet geometric structures to the florid, gilded, exhibitionist buildings of Catholic Antwerp.

3 MOMU - Antwerp's Fashion Museum
This is a new museum, probably inspired by Antwerp's recent reputation as a centre of fashion innovation. It's located in a purpose-built structure in a street of fashionable shops - just across the street from designer Dries Van Noten whose window display was so fashionably deconstructed that at first glance I thought they were cleaning out their display spaces. The Museum is primarily a space for visiting exhibitions and I was fortunate enough to see a very well curated exhibition of silks and printed fabrics from the archive of Swiss fabric designer Abraham who designed and supplied textiles for haute couture French designers from the 1950s to 1990s. There was not only a display of the luxurious fabrics, arranged in themes such as roses, animal prints, tartans and checks, but also of clothes from Parisian couturiers such as Christian Dior, Yves St Laurent, Givenchy and Balenciaga.

The photos below are of textiles featuring rose designs and of Christian Dior dresses from the mid 1950s made from the rich Abraham fabrics.




4 Cogels-Osylei
This is a street in the Zurenborg area of Antwerp that was developed around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. The street is a a most exuberant display of grand houses in Art Nouveau and other romantic and revivalist architectural styles of the period. There are towers and onion-shaped domes and wrought iron and coloured brickwork and every other elaborate architectural decoration you could imagine. Over time the prestige of the area declined and in the 1960s there were plans to pull down the houses for more practical, economical housing. But artists and other activists demonstrated and the street was, thankfully, preserved. As I walked along the street I noticed a number of architects', accountants' and medical specialists' offices, though some of the grand buildings still seem to be simply residential.

I couldn't manage to capture the grandeur of the full street in a photo, so here instead are a selection of doorways. I think they give an idea both of the amazing decoration of the houses as well as the variety of styles:



5 The shopping
Antwerp is a clothes shopper's paradise. In a relatively small area you can find every brand of fashionable clothes you might want. There are all the usual high-end luxury shops found anywhere in the world, but there are also edgier, trendy local designers, high-street fashion, and all the latest fads. But I didn't actually do any clothes shopping. Instead, I visited Julija's yarn and fabric shop. Such tempting shopping for knitters, sewers and quilters.


[Forgive me for cutting off the top of the shop's name - I took this photo very quickly to avoid being flattened by a tram]

The shop is much larger than it seems from this photo as it turns at a right angle and has another shop front on a side street. Julija's has a small selection of yarn brands, but when the selection is Malabrigo, Spud and Chloe, Blue Skies Alpaca and French yarn La Droguerie - all in wide colour ranges - what more do you want?



And the fabric range includes Liberty, Heather Ross, Michael Miller, Nani Iro and other brands I don't know. Lucky I don't sew!



So that's my list. I imagine it's a list that's suitable for someone who likes knitting and is interested in architecture and fashion - perhaps not a very wide audience. I had a very enjoyable, though exhausting, day and a bit in Antwerp.