Amsterdam is the last port of call on the cruise. What a fascinating city and what a tribute to the ingenuity and perseverance of the Dutch. There are not many major cities lower than sea level though it appears that climate change will create a good many more, starting with New Orleans and Norfolk, VA. No one has done more than the Dutch to take this head on and they have been a consistent leader in water engineering, even from the earliest times when Dutch engineers helped drain the fens in Cambridgeshire, England.
The heyday of Amsterdam and the Low Countries was in the 17th century. The Dutch East India Company was formed in 1590 and a hundred years later it had 50,000 employees and an army of 10,000 which it deployed around the world, mostly in Southeast Asia. Amsterdam had one of the first stock exchanges, founded in 1609, and one of the first financial bubbles, the Tulip mania and crash in 1636-37. It's wealth was spent on objects and recorded by artists in portraits that still attract us today. Indeed, one historian has said that the Renaissance in Holland was the second best example, after Italy, of conspicuous consumption until our own times. We think of The Netherlands as open-minded today, but it also took in Jews and Huguenots fleeing Catholic suppression in the 16th century. In the 18th century, of course, England became dominant, but Amersterdam still boasts the world's largest flower market.
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| Worker painting Delft porcelain |
Holland is known for its beautiful porcelain and I opted for the shore excursion to Delft, which was also the home of Vermeer and his many children. Visiting the Delft factory was fascinating. It was being able to import kaolin from China that made possible the beautiful white color of the porcelain. The color that is still hand-painted on the bisque after its first firing is actually black, but it turns into that beautiful blue as it reacts to the heat of the second firing.
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Building Decoration, Delft |
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Traditional Delft
Front Doors |
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| Delft Street Scene |
The city of Delft is quite charming. As everywhere in Holland and even in southern Belgium, there are canals (and bicycles) in abundance. The buildings in Delft are just lovely, most built in the 17th century, but here they have a very special tradition of painting their front doors in a very dark green, almost black color and rubbing it to a very high shine. The house numbers are painted in white script as is the name of the original owner. In the middle ages, the people who lived here bathed once or twice a year, but they polished their brass door nobs every day -- and still do. One only hopes they bathe more often nowadays!
