La Roche-sur-Yon

La Roche-sur-Yon

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Girl with a Pearl Earring

On Monday, the stars aligned.  Wanting to branch out from Amsterdam, I decided to head south along the western part of the country.  The Netherlands is very small, so after only forty minutes on the train, I was in Zuid-Holland (south Holland), the country's most densely-populated province.  I was drawn by a small town called Delft.

Just before leaving my hostel in Amsterdam, it occurred to me that the day was not going to be all fun and games if I had to drag my suitcase around more cobblestone streets - my shoulder socket may not have made it.  After some quick Googling in the hostel lobby, I discovered from other travelers commenting on travel forums that the Delft train station was under construction and the luggage lockers were temporarily removed.  I'd never used luggage lockers before and was a little wary, but I took the advice of a random stranger on the internet and bought a train ticket instead to locker-equipped Den Haag HS instead.  This station, though not the main station in Den Haag, is about seven minutes from Delft.  Luckily, I had had to get a small backpack in Amsterdam (the peanut butter wouldn't fit in my suitcase) - even though the lockers looked secure, I felt better being able to carry my laptop, flute, and visa documents with me.

Suitcase-free, under a brilliant blue sky, I headed to Delft, which I fell in love with instantly.  Once I navigated past the train station construction zone, I entered a maze of narrow cobblestone streets and canals (some green with algae).  The town was quiet and calm, just waking up around eleven in the morning.  I wove my way to the city centre, which is a large courtyard with the Stadhuis (city hall) on one end and the Nieuwe Kerk (new church) on the other; they're connected by rows of small cafés and shops on either side.  The Oude Kerk (old church) is just a few blocks away.

Delft has an incredible history, much of it dealing with the two churches.  I went first to the Nieuwe Kerk, whose tower is the second-highest in the Netherlands after the Domtoren in Utrecht.  Nieuwe Kerk also houses the crypt where William the Orange is entombed as well as several other royals of the House of Orange-Nassau.  (William the Orange was an influential leader of the rebellion against Spanish persecution of Dutch Protestants in the 1500s.  He was assassinated in Delft in 1584.  The first letter of each of the Dutch national anthem's fifteen verses - yes, fifteen - spell out 'WILLEM VAN NASSOV' in his honor...but they usually only sing the first and sixth verses.)  His intricate marble tomb is on the UNESCO world heritage list.

Interestingly, Nieuwe Kerk was initially created because, the story says, a handful of people living in Delft in the 1400s saw visions of a church that would not go away until eventually the initial wooden church was built.  Since the permanent building was erected, it has been destroyed three times:  Once by fire, once because of iconoclasm which destroyed anything Roman-Catholic, and once by gunpowder explosion.  The tower of the current church was blackened by a chemical reaction in the stone used to build it, and according to the brochure, "there's no use cleaning it".

Nieuwe Kerk
After looking around the church, I decided to go up to the top of the tower, which turned out to be a terrible decision.  I've climbed several European church towers through small, cramped circular stairways, but none were as terrifying as this one.  The more than three hundred steps were mostly worn, slippery, unevenly-spaced wooden planks; there were often breaks where the handrails mysteriously disappeared for awhile and there was nothing to hang on to; there was only one staircase to go up and down, so when you met someone going the opposite direction, it was a very awkward game of climbing over each other and trying not to fall.  Even at the top, the passage circling the tower itself was incredibly narrow.  There's no way this passage would have passed code in the U.S.  I met a couple at the top; as I was taking pictures with my phone, the man said, "Oh, you also didn't think to get a wrist strap?"  It would have been too easy for an unsecured phone or camera to plummet over the edge.  The sign at the entrance boasted a "60-person max" for the tower; I can't honestly see how sixty would have fit.

Stadhuis on the bottom left; Oude Kerk on the top right.
With my feet safely on the ground again, I went in search of another piece of history connected with Delft:  The incredible painter Johannes Vermeer, who spent most of his life in Delft and Den Haag.  There is an excellent museum dedicated to him on a street just off the city centre, which has in-depth information about his lifetime of paintings (a small collection compared with most artists).  Vermeer is famous for his mastery of the usage of light in his paintings - the techniques he used are very mathematical.  The museum doesn't hold any of his original works, though, and I wondered where I could find his most famous painting, Girl with a Pearl Earring.  This masterpiece is what the Dutch call a tronie - a painting of a head that is not meant to be a portrait; the subject herself is a mystery.


For the rest of the afternoon, I did more wandering, finding the oldest bridge in the city (built in the 1400s) along the river and browsing Delft's famous blue-painted pottery.  After school let out, kids and families could be seen biking serenely around the city.  When I sat down to lunch, I looked up the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and found that it was housed in none other than the city in which I'd left my luggage:  Den Haag.  Eager to get there before the Mauritshuis museum closed, I peeked into the Oude Kerk (the burial location of many historical figures, including Vermeer himself and Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the famous scientist) and then hopped on a train back to Den Haag.

Den Haag is the political center of the Netherlands, the seat of the Dutch government and parliament, though Amsterdam is technically the capital.  Although the HS train station isn't in the loveliest part of town, the Mauritshuis art museum is about a fifteen-minute walk away in an upscale area.  The museum itself is a beautiful, classy building with a small but excellent selection of paintings.  It was well worth the extra dash into the city...and Vermeer's famous painting is just as mysterious and intriguing as everyone claims.  The background of the painting was originally a dark green, which wore away eventually.  In the museum, it's displayed on a green wall so that you can almost see the colors that would have been reflected when it was first painted.

At the end of the day, I retrieved my luggage safe and sound in Den Haag HS and jumped on a train to Rotterdam.  It's worth noting that, before leaving Amsterdam, I worried about not being able to speak Dutch in smaller towns.  I can recognize several Dutch words at this point and can guess at the meanings of many more, but I'm not familiar with the pronunciation and certainly can't hold a conversation.  Besides being extremely friendly, curious, and helpful, I've found that the Dutch also speak impeccable English, and not only servers and museum workers - anyone you meet on the street can easily switch into English when they realize that's the language you speak.

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