Spring Break: The Netherlands

I never made a post for the Netherlands part of spring break but that was a while ago so this will be a sort of condensed version. We spent four days in the Netherlands. We stayed in Amsterdam and took two day trips to Haarlem and The Hague. We went to those places to check out museums like Mauritshuis to see paintings like Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring and Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp.

Amsterdam highlights include Rembrandt's house and the Van Gogh museum. The Van Gogh museum is easily one of my favorite places ever. I love everything about the Netherlands. The people are nice (and pretty much everyone speaks English!). I loved seeing the two smaller towns as well. I could definitely see myself living in Amsterdam! Also, dutch pancakes are delicious.

When we were booking fights, it seemed difficult to get home from Amsterdam so we decided to fly out of Brussels instead. With less than a day in Brussels, we decided to go to Rene Magritte's house. Brussels was freezing and difficult to navigate. However we stayed at a real hotel that night and the beds were incredibly comfortable.

Magritte's kitchen

Spring Break: PARIS

On Thursday evening (of a fairly stressful midterms week!), I left for spring break. We flew to Paris (then took a long bus ride and short taxi ride) and got to our hostel late at night. Since I only was able to sleep for 10 minutes the previous night, I was just happy to go straight to sleep, even on the top bunk of an uncomfortable bed and with two strangers also in our tiny room.

In the morning, we made our way over to the Louvre. I had been once before (four years ago) but that was before studying Art History so I was pretty excited about going back. After showing our student visas to get in for free (pretty awesome!), we spent five hours looking at beautiful art. My favorite artists I saw at the Louvre include Rembrandt, Vermeer, Steenwyck, Claude (Lorrain)...and of course I enjoyed seeing work by Leonardo & Michelangelo even though I've been seeing a crazy amount of their work recently.

We spent that evening admiring (and eating dinner near) the Eiffel tower. The next morning, we took a train out to Versailles. It was cold and rainy for most of the day. We didn't walk through the entire palace because Mary mostly wanted to see the hall of mirrors and I had already been there. Plus, even though the whole place is beautiful, the gardens are pretty much my favorite part. We had tea and desserts in the cafe/tea house while we were there. I had earl grey tea and a vanilla/white chocolate eclaire. Mary had a tiny piece of chocolate cake (with pieces of gold on top of it) and citrus tea.

Next we went to Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame. We waited in line and actually paid money to get into Sainte Chapelle but it turned out to be even more majestic than I was expecting it to be. It's a small church, especially in comparison to Notre Dame, but I would probably go back to Paris just to go back to Sainte Chapelle. Then we went to Centre Pompidou. They had a special exhibition of Mondrian/De Stijl which was awesome. They even had some of Mondrian's tree paintings, which made me really happy to see. We ate dinner near the Pompidou. I got a raspberry julep with my tomato & mozzarella salad (basically the only vegetarian dish Paris has) but it was way too strong so I couldn't even finish it.

On Sunday, we went to the Musée de l'Orangerie. It's a small museum but I'm really glad we went because they have an incredible collection of Renoir's (and a bunch of other awesome artists, too). I love impressionism.

Then I took a train out to Vernon so I could take a bus to Giverny to see Monet's house. When I got to Vernon (an hour away) I was told that Monet's house isn't open in the winter. So I had a terrible time waiting around in Vernon, which was like a ghost town. I was really unhappy when I found out that the next train back to Paris was in over two hours but I did find a cute bakery for coffee and macaroons. The vanilla macaroon was the best of the ones I got. I was so happy to get back to Gare Saint Lazare. That night for dinner, I had french fries and white wine. It wasn't really by choice. Paris hates vegetarians more than any other city I've been to. =/

On Monday, we went up to the 56th floor of a skyscraper to check out a view of Paris from above. Then we went to the station to buy train tickets to Amsterdam and wait around in a freezer of a train station. Even though it was uncomfortably cold, we watched Ratatouille on Mary's tiny ipod nano screen. I'd been wanting to watch it for a while and I loved it.

The Louvre

I love seeing people do master copies.

Cupid and Psyche

Eiffel Tower at night

Versailles

Gardens at Versailles

Sainte Chapelle (looking straight up)

Pompidou window

Sainte Chapelle

Musée de l'Orangerie

Vernon, France (my least favorite place in the entire world)

Next up: The Netherlands...

Recap

Before I go into writing about spring break, here's a quick update on a few trips that I neglected to post about...

ROME

We took an overnight trip to Rome (at the end of January) to see the Vatican Museums, St Peter's Basilica, the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, etc... I loved Rome and would definitely love to revisit it and check out things we didn't have time for (the Borghese Galleries). My favorite parts were seeing Michelangelo's Pieta and going to the Trevi Fountain (at night)...but really, the whole trip was a blast. I put a bunch of Rome pictures on facebook: here and here (one album for each day).

FRANKFURT

On the first weekend in February, I went to Frankfurt, Germany. We found cheap flights through RyanAir. If you've never flown with RyanAir, it's sort of like a normal airline except you fly into airports that are really far away from the city so you have to take a (12/13 euros and at least an hour long) bus into the city. Also sometimes when the pilot lands the plane, it's terrifying and you almost die. But the flights can sometimes be ridiculously cheap so it's worth it.

The MMK was awesome. MMK is their modern art museum and there was a Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition. I learned about him last semester in Digital Foundations class. I think his work is incredibly fascinating. They also had a bunch of Larry Clark photos in the museum but I'm not a huge fan of his work. We also went to the zoo. It wasn't the most impressive zoo I've ever seen but there were some really cool monkeys. Some of the monkeys had mustaches. Also they had penguins. Penguins are funny and Shelby loved them.

It was a fun weekend but I doubt I'd ever go back to Frankfurt, especially in the winter. It was cold and people walk right into you and don't apologize (but maybe I'm generalizing).

I posted a bunch of pictures here (including monkeys!).

VOLTERRA & SAN GIMINIATO

On Feb 11th, we took a day trip to two Tuscan hill towns. We didn't spend a lot of time in Volterra but both towns were beautiful. Nero took us to a few museums and churches. At San Giminiato, we had some free time to explore the area. The views from San Giminiato are breathtaking. Here's some pictures from that day.