Sadly for blogging purposes, there were no thong-wearing or shirtless men seen on the breakfast run today, but as I was waiting for my bagels, a super-handsome man came in, with dark, curly hair, a dark long coat, and a dark scarf. Dubbs said she will be getting the bagels from now on.

Dubbs was in charge of things today, so that meant three things – museums, museums, and museums. She loves art. So off we went back to the Rijksmuseum, since we had only seen a very small part of it. We got there just after the museum opened at 9:00, and we had each room almost to ourselves (even the one containing The Night Watch). It only started filling up, largely with school children, at 9:45 or 10:00. Dubbs wanted to see the nineteenth-century paintings and then see all the Rembrandts in the museum. Sadly, a painting she really wanted to see, The Milkmaid, is on loan to a museum in  Tokyo currently. It took me much longer than it should have to realize that the Dutch national art museum would be almost all Dutch artists. Ooops. I tended to like the unusually lit paintings (sunsets, cloudy days, moonlit scenes), especially if they had water in them. Mer liked the ones with bare trees.

We spent about two hours in the Rijksmuseum and then took the Metro to Amsterdam’s southern train station, where we caught a train to The Hague, about fifty minutes away. When we did get there, we discovered that the train station was surrounded by “buildings of the future”-feeling buildings, with curved surfaces and shining metal, and some really seemed to be made of plastic. They all made getting out of the train station confusing, but we finally found our way out.

We grabbed lunch in a small shopping street, and then made our way to the main square near the parliament building, which was next to the beautiful Mauritshuis Museum. The museum was in a former mansion, so it was a living space. What that means was that the art hung in large, but human-sized, rooms, which made it much more intimate. There were only about fifteen paintings or even fewer hanging in each room, and there were only sixteen rooms on two floors. Seeing this museum was really easy, and the views out many of the windows were across a pond into a park ringed with cute buildings. This was definitely one of my favorite museum buildings.

Since the Dutch Golden Age (the seventeenth century) produced lots of wealthy people, Dutch painting has a lot of portraits – the rich liked getting their own picture painted. As such, there were a lot of portraits in the museum, but the most famous one, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, is a tronie – a made-up portrait. She never really existed, but she is plastered on everything in gift shops around Amsterdam (and certainly in the museum in The Hague).

One of the things that caught my eye was the flexibility Rembrandt displayed – he could create paintings of great detail, and then he could paint ones where the backgrounds were just suggested shapes, or the subject was painted with broad stokes and blurry lines. Some of his paintings seemed to me to anticipate the Impressionist movement about two hundred years before it actually happened.

We saw the entire museum, including a special exhibit on Dutch paintings found in great English houses (the English really liked Dutch paintings), in under two hours. We walked back to the train station and got back home around 6:30. I was not feeling totally well, probably as the result of caffeine from drinking too many Cokes over the last few days, so Mer and Dubbs went off to dinner without me, and took advantage of my picky absence by going to a Thai restaurant. When I was feeling a little better, I went to a supermarket and got salted nuts and fruit juices.

So it was not the best end of the day, but the day itself was quite fun. I wonder what Bagel Boy will turn up tomorrow morning?