(You might want to read day 3 and all the days before this one to avoid getting confused.)
Day Four was very much reserved for the van Gogh Museum. While “museum” always has that dusty, old sound to it, this is certainly untrue of this particular one. After grabbing lunch (ham’n’cheese croissants—mmmh, greasy fish— :barf:, cold chicken— :barf:, smoothies—mmmh), we trodded over to the Museumsplein and forked over the 10€/person to get in and 4€ more for the (good) audio tour. To start with, I sent Josie a video message from the museum while she was on the pot. Fun…
The museum starts out on the ground floor with a roomful of what was before and around Vincent at the outset of his life as an artist. This is the door-opener for the first floor, where you stumble into a narration of Van Gogh’s (short) life, visualized and accompanied by his pictures. It is amazing to see how his life’s events and mental self reflect into his pictures and vice versa. I would honestly have missed much of what can be discovered without the audio tour, and plus, it gives you the opportunity to just sit down and listen when your feet grow weary of all the standing around. They also have a PDA-based multimedia tour available, but I wonder if it would be worth the money, since I found it just perfect to be able to listen and look at the paintings, keeping both senses busy, but not overloaded.
We stayed and explored the museum until closing time. Among the things we found were (well-taken) artistic photos of the sites in Vincent van Gogh’s life as they are today and a few computers where you can explore the museum’s comprehensive web site, linked above.
Afterwards, we bought dinner, cooked, and headed out for a night on the town. Our first step was into some “we have free live music” place. It was good. Until the free live music, courtesy of “The Invisible Orchestra” started. We downed our drinks and left, looking for other entertainment. “The Australian” had bad coffee, expensive chocolates and girly music, all delivered by the most boygroup-y band of servers I’ve ever met. Making rounds through a few other bars, we ended up back at Boom to drink to the end of our trip.
(That’s it. You can stop reading now. Day 5 was the ride home—and fairly uneventful, except for what happened around Frankfurt. Yeah, we saw the Begijnhof before we left. Go there, it’s neat. But it doesn’t warrant another entry.)
Update: I realize that I did a shoddy job proofreading an earlier version of this entry. Fixed.