Help, I'm Surrounded!

We waited until our last day in Amsterdam to visit the Rijksmuseum. We didn't plan it that way but it turned out to be another of those places where you had to be in line when they opened or you would be in line all day and there were some days we just didn't feel like getting up at the crack of dawn. (It was a vacation, after all.)

We got in line a bit after 8 AM and they were to open at 9 AM. We were probably about the sixth and seventh people in the line. By the time the museum was ready to open the line extended past the portico. I couldn't tell if it went around the block or not. I do know that if I had arrived after 9 AM that I would have been waiting far longer than 40 minutes.

While we were waiting, we could watch through the windows. At first it appeared a bit unfortunate that the museum employee uniforms consisted of black skirts or pants and brown shirts, sort of a fascist fashion. Mark pointed this out to me. I'm not sure if the "brown shirts" were a totally European phenomena or if I'm just too young to remember. If the "brown shirts" existed in the U.S. it's not something I would have known much about. But when we went inside we could see that the shirts were actually brown ombre, so not as Nazi-esque as we originally thought.

Anyway, fashion aside - we bought the audio tour guides and cued up the 90-minute highlights tour. I was listening to the audio and gazing intently at Vermeer's "The Kitchen Maid" when I realized I'd been surrounded by a group of Japanese tourists. They had managed to insert themselves between me and the Vermeer. They clearly had no concept of personal space. There must have been 20 or 30 of them but I did manage to escape. Unfortunately, there were several groups of them to contend with. None of these Japanese tour groups waited for anyone to move on, they just descended on the target painting and you could get out of their way or be engulfed. But they were stealthy, you didn't see them or hear them until it was too late and you were surrounded. Fortunately, by noon most of them were gone (probably moved on to the Van Gogh museum) and we could go back to looking at the paintings without feeling rushed or crowded. I don't know how people visit museums with a time limit.

The other thing that I found mildly annoying in the museum were the people who were photographing the paintings. Why on earth would anyone do that? Although I didn't look, I'm relatively certain that the museum gift shop sells books with beautiful, professional photographs of the museum's collections. And let's not forget that everything is available on the internet. (Where do you think the image of the Vermeer above came from?) But hordes of people were in there taking photographs. And then to my horror, Mark started taking pictures, not of paintings but of small items - to highlight the intricate detail. Which, as you can see, is quite stunning.

The museum was wonderful. Not unmanageable like the Smithsonian or the British Museum - those will take your entire week and you'll only see a fraction of what is there. Not that we saw everything in the Rijksmuseum - by 2:30 we were feeling a bit museumed-out. But we did see the highlights and most of the collections and we had a very nice lunch.