Wereldmuseum, part 1

On Friday, I walked across the Erasmusbrug to see the Wereldmuseum--the World Museum.  This museum holds all kinds of cultural artifacts from around the world.  Anyone can see the permanent collection for free but the special exhibit, which they have in honor of the museum's 125th anniversary, costs 12 euros.  Fortunately, I have a Museumkaart and that meant I could see the whole museum for free.  You get a little audio-guide to take with you and, periodically through the museum there are little tabs and, when you hold your little guide up to it, it tells you about things in the room.  It was actually pretty handy.  The museum takes up the top three floors and there is a restaurant and gift shop on the ground floor.  You ride up to the second floor in an elevator to start the tour and then you walk through the whole rest of the museum and, when you leave, the only way out of the museum is through the gift shop.

According to the audio guide, the Wereldmuseum had started out as a Gentleman's Club.  I think, however, that there may have been a little cross-cultural mis-translation and, from the context, that they meant "Gentleman's Club" in terms of the kind that Bertie Wooster used to go to.  Club members were traders and people in the shipping business who used the club as a place to network and to display the treasures that they had brought back from all over the world.  Eventually they decided to open up the building to the public and eventually they donated/sold the building, and its artifacts to the city.  The museum had a major overhaul a couple of years ago so it is all new and fancy and a lot of fun to look through.  It took me about two hours to walk  through the whole thing.  The 125 Masterpieces Special Exhibit is a collection of the best objects from the collection.  You can see a little photo album of some of the pieces from the permanent collection here.  You can see a little photo album of some of the pieces from the 125 Masterpieces exhibition here.  They did not allow photography at the museum.

A lot of the stuff was from Indonesia, which makes sense, considering the length and depth of the Dutch involvement there.  However, a lot of Dutch collectors have donated their collections to the museum over the years so, at least according to the museum's own little audio guide, the Wereldmuseum has one of the best collections of world cultural and religious artifacts in the world.  The have a large collection of Peruvian stuff and a really incredible collection of stuff from the far east. They even had pieces from James Cook's own collection.  They also had North American native work.  One of the 125 Masterpieces pieces was a beaded Lakota bag (Hey!  I used to live where they used to live!).

They also had a large collection of Islamic art, mostly pictures and book covers from the 15th and 16th centuries.  They were painted with silver and gold leaf accents and were really quite beautiful.  There were a couple of interesting things.  One was the parallels with Byzantine art--there are similarities in structure and style that are interesting.  For one thing, apparently, the Islamic equivalent of Byzantium's golden halo to signify divinity or spirituality is golden flames.  It was quite interesting.

Byzantine Art--notice the halo around Justinian's head.

Islamic Art--notice the flames around Muhammed (on the right) and Moses, Abraham,  etc. (on the left).

The other interesting thing was the number of "Christian" themes that showed up in the works. There were pictures of Jonah and the Whale, different scenes with Abraham and a picture of "the Sacrifice of Ishmael" which looks like the sacrifice of Issac except that, in this particular picture at least, it looks like the angel is showing up with a spotted goat.

Did you know that Batik fabric was originally made as a form of worship to Indonesian idols?  The fabric was used in ceremonial clothing and patterns were woven together in a special order during religious ceremonies. This was important because, they say, the weaving s a textile representation of the same kinds of things as their chanting, or the way they combined scents, to assist in the path to enlightenment.  Once they had noted the commercial value of Batik, they started selling it to other folks.  They now differentiate between the regular stuff and the sacred stuff by decorating the religious stuff with gold leaf.

If you look at the photo album from the museum's permanent collection (right here), the very last picture is of a very colorful picture.  This picture is impressive because it is made entirely with colored sand. Apparently sand pictures, which are called mandalas, are used in Buddhist worship as a way of incorporating prayers.  It can take weeks for a design to be made, during which time they pray a lot.  Then, when it is done, the sweep up all the sand and dump it in the river as a symbol of the transience of life.  Can you imagine?  The one at the Wereldmuseum was made as a prayer for the safety of the Dahli Lama (I think) but for some reason it was preserved.  The little audio tour said that it is one of only two sand mandalas that are retained in the West.  I have attached some links to different websites that show the way they make these mandalas.  It is some pretty impressive artistry.   Here and here are two different sites that show pictures of different mandalas.  Here is a site that shows a mandala that was made after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington and here is a site that shows time elapse photography of the mandala being built and then destroyed.  They had a 1000 piece puzzle of the mandala at the museum available at the gift shop and I was almost tempted to get it.

Toevlucht Vinden--Finding Refuge

I was out walking on Friday and I saw this monument.  It commemorates the bombing of Rotterdam by the Germans on May 14, 1940.  The way that this is commemorated deserves its own post, and a little more research, because it is fascinating but I found this story first.  In the map of Rotterdam that is printed on the stone below, the gray blob in the middle is the area of the city that was destroyed by the bombing and the fires that resulted.  The line around the edge of the bombed out area was called the "brandgrens"--literally, "the fire border."

When I got home, I looked up the website that is listed on the monument--www.brandgrens.nl.  It is the official Rotterdam website for an oral history and cultural memory project about WWII and it looks like it will be really interesting to look through.  By accident, I stumbled upon a set of interviews with people who were living in Rotterdam when the Germans bombed the city and invaded the Netherlands.  There are several interviews and I decided to listen to them because the subject sounded interesting and because it seemed like a good chance to practice my Dutch listening skills.

The second video I watched was an hour and a half long and was with Elizabeth Rippe.  She was fourteen years old when the Germans came.  At the beginning of the interview, she was asked what her family did during the war and she talked about reading the Bible and singing psalms.  Later, she talked about memorizing the Psalms in school. She talked about what it was like living through the bombings, with the noises and the debris flying everywhere.  When she was talking about how hard it was to breath with the dust, she sounded like she was choking just on the memory of it.

But what really struck me was when the interviewer asked how she and her family and those around them dealt with the  trauma and the uncertainties that the war must have produced.  She said that they read the Psalms.  She remembered, as the bombs were falling, that they would open up the Bible and, every time, would read from Psalm 91.  And fifty years later, she quoted what she had learned as a little girl:

"For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone."

She remembered people asking what was going to happen and what to do and where to turn and she remembered the answer: "Alleen God kan us help en God is nog bij"--"Only God can help us and God is still with us."  And she cried.

At the end of the interview, she got out her Bible and read the whole of Psalm 91 and she looked up and she smiled and she said "I go here to find my refuge."  "Is this still your refuge?" asked the interviewer.  "Yes" she said. "Always, forever."


If you click here, you can see the section of the interview where Elizabeth Rippe reads Psalm 91.  It is in Dutch of course, but you might be able to follow along anyways.

If you click here, you can see the English language version of the home page of the "brandgrens" page.

Rotterdam Lights

Tuesday evening after the Dutch Cafe was, in keeping with this ridiculously beautiful and unseasonable weather we are having, a really beautiful evening out, so, after going down into the metro, realizing that I had a 10 minute wait until the next train came anyway, and thinking that it just seemed particularly stuffy down there, I decided to walk to Beurs Metro, where I would be switching lines anyways.  It was such a nice evening for walking, and the general tenor of the whole area was just so conducive to strolling that I ended up walking all the way home, which was just about three miles.  The weather was perfect and it was just the perfect time to walk through town (I went the long way which goes around through the nicer/more business oriented part of town) because restaurants, but not bars, were starting to close so there were a fair number of couples strolling through town, as well as a lot of people out jogging.

The walking trip did make me wish that I 1) knew how to work the night photo settings on my camera, 2) had a tripod so I could take pictures at night without them turning out all jiggly looking, and 3) had even brought my camera with me at all.  Rotterdam has been designed to look awfully photogenic at night.  The cranes and ships in the Haven Museum are all lit up with colored spot lights (and there were quite a few people out taking pictures of it) plus almost all of the other buildings have decorative lights on them with stripes and designs in different colors and configurations.  The slant-y, leaning building that I have pointed out before, had all of its flashy green lights doing different pictures.  For a while it was doing a spinning globe, so that the different continents were going 'round and 'round.  Then it did a heart that would start out small, grow to fill the screen, and then go back to small again.  Then it had "1888" scrolling across the front of the building in numbers as tall as the building.  1888 is apparently the Dutch equivalent of "0"--it is directory inquiries.  If you look at this site, it shows a picture of the building with a giant heart on it.  If you want to see what Rotterdam really looks like at night (I am pretty sure that my pictures wouldn't look like this, even if I had taken my camera) you can go to this site to see a few pictures.

One other thing I noticed, as I was walking home, was that the Luxor Theater (a pretty famous theater in Rotterdam) is having, on October 11th, a concert of two of Carl Orff's works, the most famous being "Carmina Burana"--it is one of those pieces of classical music that everyone has heard, even if they don't know it, because it is used in television commercials all the time.  I happen to like Orff's oeuvre, so I am trying to decide if I should go and see it.  The super-cheap tickets are 25 euros and tickets go up from there to 48 euros, which is a little more than I really want to spend.  However, one hour before the show starts, they will give you a 50% discount with a student card (among other things) so, if any of the cheapo seats are still available, that might be a pretty good deal.  I wonder if I would have to get dressed up?  The Luxor Theater is nothing if not eclectic.  The program for the next month or so (which you can see here) covers everything from a flamenco-musical called "Zorro" to a Neil Diamond impersonator and last month they had a flying trapeze act in as well (and if you think that doesn't result in some dopey looking advertisements, you couldn't be wronger).

The Luxor Theater, looking north.  You can see the Erasmusbrug just to the right of the theater.  It is the tipi shaped thing over the road.