For the love of God

An extra treat during our visit of the Rijksmuseum was the opportunity to stand in line for 20 minutes to see Damian Hirst's For the Love of God, a platinum skull embedded with 8,601 diamonds and a set of real human teeth. It sold for $50 million. According to the museum flyer, the piece's title came from Hirst's mother. It's what she said when her son told her what he was making.

We were allowed into the exhibit in small groups. You wound your way through a narrow pitch-black hallway into a pitch-black exhibit hall. The skull, displayed in a glass case, was illuminated by spotlights. You were naturally drawn to the skull because to do otherwise would mean crashing around in the dark next to God-knows-who. The skull was sparkly.

The next room contained Hirst's personal selection of works from the Rijksmuseum, a mix of portraits and still lifes, each with a paragraph of Hirst's loopy commentary. There was something definitely bizarre about standing in the shadow of Dutch burghers as we snaked our way in to see a diamond skull. I imagine these businessmen of some four centuries ago with their eyes upon us calculating how many slaves they'd have to move to snag a bauble like that. It sure was a better fit than Hirst's A Thousand Years, a glass cube with maggots, flies and bloody cow's head, which I think anyone from 1635 is going to see as a waste of good head cheese.

Scarlet Johanson doesn't live here anymore

Our second day here we spent part of the afternoon at the Rijksmuseum, enjoying paintings of the Dutch golden age. We had time either for this museum or the Van Gogh Museum, and it didn't take much discussion for Rembrandt to win out. In my experience, anything painted after about 1850 looks no better in person than it does on a mug or a poster.

The Rijksmuseum features paintings and decorative arts from Netherland's Golden Age. According to the tour books, the 16th-Century Dutch, being both Protestant and rich, had paintings commissioned not of religious subjects so much as of themselves and scenes of ordinary life. The still lifes are amazing. Here's one by Willem Claesz Heda. Look at how the different surfaces reflect each other.

For more detail, check out the Rijksmuseum website. Warning: Glistening renderings of oysters, cheese, bread and various dead game will work up an appetite, so have a snack first.

Sometimes when visiting a museum, it's hard to figure out why a particular painting or sculpture became so famous. Some people (OK, Americans) visit the Louvre, for example, just to see the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa and then leave. Why is the Venus de Milo so popular as opposed to the sculpture right next to her? What is it about the Mona Lisa?

This is not the case with Dutch art. After an hour in the Rijksmuseum, it's easy to see why Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer is the most recognized face of the era.

She's a knockout. Every other woman looked about like this:

Gal with a Unibrow is not going to inspire a novel or a movie starring Scarlet Johanson.

Surprise! Girl with a Pearl Earring is not actually at the Rijksmuseum. It's hanging in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, as the sign in the gift shop helpfully informs you (although you can buy a postcard.)

Dutch spoken here - occasionally

The Dutch speak perfect English. On one hand, this makes for easy travel. On the other hand, it means you don't get to hear much Dutch, which is too bad because I like the sound of it. Dutch conversation is like tumbled stones, gutteral like German but with the hard edges worn off. I now understand why my Dutch friends have almost no accent. Dutch has the same cadence as English. More than once I thought I was hearing a conversation in the mother tongue, only encrypted. The sounds were the same but the words made no sense. Is this what it feels like to lose your mind? The only difference is a faint phlegmy scrape of the gears every four or five words.

Some Dutch pronounciation makes perfect sense. Schiphol Airport, for example, is pronounced Schiphol. Other words are another story, even the Dutch words you think you know. Gouda is pronounced Khow-da (Gear scrape on the first syllable.) Van Gogh is the sound of a cat working a hairball.

European winter travel tip

Being basically cheap people, we have made all of our trips to Europe in the dead of winter. Lesson learned: when packing for European travel in the winter, listen to your mother. Here is what I was supposed to dump off on my trip in order to make room for tulip bulbs, wheels of gouda and art books:


Packing Light part 2 by SamanthaC

Except for immediately losing five pounds of Vanity Fair on the plane ride over, I kept everything because I was FREEZING COLD. Those four turtlenecks? I think I wore them all, every day, one on top of the other. I ended up BUYING a pair of leggings. Momma told me I would freeze my Heineken off and she was right.

This would have been easily solved by bringing a proper coat. By wearing a coat that was too light (as I also did in Italy last year), I had to cling to layers of clothing. I could not downsize my luggage as went. Even worse, I was lumpy.

How to pack like an air plant

Here is what I will be taking for a 4 1/2 day trip to Amsterdam. Part of the plan is to discard items as I go. (I picked up many of my clothes, books and magazines second hand and free in the first place.)Everything needs to fit in a small backpack since we will be walking from the train to our hotel and will be changing hotels every day.


Packing for a trip by SamanthaC

I bought the coat (which is not as silvery as the one pictured) at a Macy's one-day 50 percent off sale and found an additional $10-off coupon. I thought a shorter down coat would be a good idea in case we rent bikes. "Your butt is going to be cold," my mom says. She's the one who brought pairs and pairs of long underwear along on our trip to Amalfi (which underwear I did indeed end up wearing.)

Here's your Starbucks home brew quote of the week. (Home brewers may print this and paste to their coffee cup.)


"I used to get all my suits in thrift stores because I realized I was the size of little old men who were dying."

JEFF RICHMOND

MUSICIAN-DIRECTOR

The man to thank for our trip to Amsterdam

Do you know who this man is?

A. Albert Einstein

B. A Dickens character

C. Randy Petersen, founder of flyertalk.com

If you said C., you win a free souvenir from our free trip to Amsterdam. We have Randy to thank for our free trip. Free. FREE. Fa-WHEE. Tom won two premium+ seats on OpenSkies new route to Amsterdam thanks to a promotion on flyertalk.com. A big thanks to Randy for the tickets and for inventing such a great travel forum, which has helped us share travel information, get many great deals and have fun communicating with others who love to travel.

Dank u wel. (For you Pennsylvania Dutch, this is real Dutch for "thank you" and is pronounced dahnk you well. Go figure. Finally, a language that makes phonetic sense.)

(Photo: The New York Times)