Van Gogh Museum
Today we had tickets to visit the Van Gogh Museum. These tickets were quite hard for us to get as it is quite a popular museum with tickets selling out sometimes months in advance. Thankfully I read somewhere that more tickets are released for the next day at 5 pm each day, and we were able to purchase some using this knowledge the night before.
Walking around the rather large gallery I browsed the many different works by Van Gogh including many of his famous self-portraits that use his famous impressionist line art style. I quite enjoy his art, so it was great to see some of his most famous paintings including the self-portraits, sunflowers, and the Potato Eaters. There was lots of art on display and even a temporary side exhibition that told the story of how Van Gogh and some of his artist friends would sit by the rivers in Paris creating their masterpieces.
The area around this museum is also quite pretty featuring a few other museums and gardens that sadly I will not have time to visit on this trip.
Bike Riding to Zaanse Schans Windmills
After the Van Gogh Museum, Oliver and I cycled to the famous windmill area called Zaanse Schans. According to the maps, it would take us around 1 hour 20 minutes to cycle to the windmills, so based off this, we rented two bicycles from our hostel for 4 hours.
We failed to factor in the fact that our rental bikes were not well oiled nor were they very efficient, and that we are not that experienced in cycling at the Dutch pace. This led to us taking around 1 hour 40 minutes to reach the windmills with many locals flying past us on the bike tracks at record pace. We ended up coining the term, ‘Dutch Minutes’ to refer to time estimates of cycle time provided by Google Maps based on the Dutch cycle pace and realizing that one Dutch minute was around 1.2 of our own cycle time minutes.
The ride was absolutely freezing, and I forgot to bring my gloves, so my hand quickly went numb as we rode at zero degrees Celsius passing the occasional patch of snow. Nonetheless, it was quite an interesting ride outside the main city of Amsterdam seeing how the locals live in their outer-city houses, even going over a ferry in one part of the journey to get across the Amsterdam shipping channel.
Once we arrived at the windmills, we were not disappointed. The area was quite picturesque, and we were able to get some very nice photos of the wooden windmills and surrounding farm areas. The hot chocolate I had whilst we walked around tasted amazing and was a great way to recover from the freezing bike ride.
Riding back from the windmills also took around 1 hour and 40 minutes and froze my hands once again. My legs felt a bit jelly when we got back, but overall, it was a fun adventure that I am glad I went on.
