Eindhoven and the Ghetto of Amsterdam

I haven't posted for awhile.  Mostly cause this week was a bit of a hard one.  It has been a month since my dad died and it hit me really hard on Monday night.  I just miss him so much.  So due to lack of sleep I skipped our Tuesday tour. 

But on Wednesday I got my ass out of bed and joined the class on a trip to a section of Amsterdam that can be considered a "ghetto".  (But not really at all.)  It consisted of all these horribly maintained high rise buildings until 1992.

In 1992 a military transport plane crashed into one of the buildings.  (These tiles are part of the memorial.  They are all made out of pieces of the destroyed buildings.) To this day they have no idea what the plane was carrying or how many people died.  There are still people getting sick from whatever was in the plane.

After the plane crash the city decided to rebuild the area and make it safer.  They destroyed some of the high rises, but others they sold apartment by apartment to people for 1 euro.  But then they were responsible for refurbishing it.  They also added features like green spaces and public art.

They also added a petting zoo.

Needless to say it was hard to get us away from there.

Although my favorite part was the artist's apartments (seen in yellow).  Artists only have to pay 300 euros for rent (about $365).  Maybe I will move to the Netherlands.

After our tour we got Suriname food.  Don't worry I didn't know where Suriname was either.  It is right above Brazil.  And they have delicious food.

Thursday was lecture, so nothing fun there.  On Friday we took the train to Eindhoven.  It is a town towards the south of the Netherlands.  We went to the Van Abbemuseum.

 I didn't like most of the museum.  There was a restropective of a Dutch artist.  Most of his work are bow ties.  (Okay really they are commentaries on the art gallery setting, but all I saw was bow ties.)  This is one of his piece I really liked.

There were two parts of the museum that I did like.  Covering a huge part of the entrance were all these drawings commenting on political issues done by a Romanian artist.

This is an example of the drawings.  They were all very ironic and hilarious.

The other part of the museum that I liked was a reproduction of an exhibit from Sao Paulo. The art work was hung on these glass panels.  (These pieces are by one of my new favorite artists, a Dutch artist named Charley Toorop.  Her faces are just amazing.)

The artist's information was written on the back side of the glass panels.  So what you saw first was the art, then the information.  This stopped people from doing that thing that I know we all do in museums.  Before looking at the art you look at the name to see if you should care about the piece.  This exhibit forced you to make your decision about if you liked it based on the artwork alone instead of what people have told you.  After that long and stressful day I enjoyed a few glasses of wine before biking home slightly tipsy.

This weekend I am heading off to Munster, Germany.  I plan on drinking beer, seeing Picasso, and sleeping in a room by myself.  It will be very exciting and relaxing.  Plus I will have tons of pictures when I get back.  (And if I get lucky I will meet these awesome guys.)