Ev's Georgick's Travel Blog

Eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokul interrupts Ev’s completion of her travel blog no more . . .

Well, Evelyn Lindberg and Tamara Georgick went on this trip almost a year ago. I can’t believe so much time has passed already. It was a splendid vacation, one where you don’t feel the need to take another vacation in order to recover from it. I remember going back to work feeling all refreshed. Iceland was interesting, although it is one of 3 countries still whaling, so that’s no good (Norway and Japan being the other two). Offering the ridiculous rational that the killing of these whales is being done for some scientific purpose, when they are clearly killing them simply to put them on the menu. It’s a very confined country, an island and all (but then so is England) with a really small population. No burning desire to return to do the same things, the experience is limited. I could see going back to Iceland to do one of the longer tours, multi-day or week long excursions, the geography being fascinating. They were proud of their unadulterated viking ponies and the fact that they can still read ancient viking texts as though they were written yesterday. Enough said.

London is a fantastic city and I spent a really wonderful period of my fervent youth here so I will always, always be fond of it in a sweet verging on the bittersweet (I’ll add melancholy because those two words always go so well together) way. The foreign singage is always fun. These three were seen around Amsterdam.

Eruption of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokul interrupts Ev’s completion of her travel blog no more . . .

We managed to pack a lot of activities into our last full day in Amsterdam.

Since it was directly across the street from us, we stopped by De Nieuwe Kirk. There must be thousands of centuries old churches scattered across Europe, seen one seen them all, right? Ha, the interior art and architecture remains so interesting, impressive.

We took a fun and interesting Canal cruise in the morning with the Blue Boat Company. A very nice way to see the cityscape. One of the unexpected highlights was that the boat actually went out beyond the canals, into the open water and near the shipping lanes.

From where we got on and off the boat it was easy walking distance to the Rijksmuseum, unexpectedly it only took us an hour to go through it, and I mean sure, we saw 50 well known masterpieces, but it still seemed to be strangley lacking. It wasn’t until we were walking away that we noticed and read the sign that said due to renovation, only a small portion of the collection was currently on display.

Not done with museums, we powered on to the Van Gogh Museum, which was a really fascinating collection of his work and correspondence and other pieces, anything connected to him, all very well representated. I didn’t realize that the period during which he created his most recognizable works of art, the style we think of when we think of Van Gogh, only lasted a few short years.

That evening we tried to find the red light district, and strangely enough couldn’t manage to. No exposure to vice for us, we remained innocents. We did stumble across the worse example of municipal trash pick I’d ever seen, or expect to see. A dozen men who seemed drunk singing and chanting and haphazardly throwing filled trash bags through the air. About half of the bags would miss the back of the trash truck and come crashing back down onto the hard street only to rip apart and spill out their contents. They were like pirates on shore leave, I remembered gaping at them open mouthed in horrified fascination. After that it was back to our hotel for us.