Viewing: museums

Maritime Museum

A visit to Het Scheepvaart Museum, or the National Maritime Museum, was something Marlon and I have had on our Amsterdam must-do list for some time. Since it was just a few minutes’ walk from our date night restaurant, we decided to go before dinner.

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The museum is housed in a gorgeous building called the Arsenal, a massive warehouse built in the 1600s, when Amsterdam was the world’s largest, wealthiest and busiest port. It was closed for extensive renovations in 2007, and reopened just this year. Inside, it still maintains the look and feel of a 17th-century warehouse…

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… with the exception of the stunning glass ceiling over the Open Courtyard, inspired by the stars that old-time sailors used to navigate the seas.

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True to form, Marlon and I were late and only had one hour to explore before closing time at 5pm. So if your trip or stopover in Amsterdam is a short one, and you find yourself with only one hour to spare for this museum (which is just one bus stop from Centraal Station, by the way), this is what you should do:

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Posted on December 2, 2012
Category: Life in Amsterdam · Labels: ,

Essential Florence: 6 Sights You Shouldn’t Miss

Florence is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited. The entire city is a work of art, and completely brought the Renaissance to life for me. We stayed in a great Airbnb flat a short walk from the Centro Storico, where most of Florence’s cultural jewels are concentrated.

After just four days, I feel like I barely scratched the surface of this amazing city and wish I could’ve done more off the tourist trail. Having said that, the “tourist circuit” is deluged with visitors for a reason, and is truly worth every bit of time and money. Here’s my list of must-sees in Florence:

The Uffizi Gallery. Home to one of the largest and oldest private art collections in the Western word, the Uffizi Gallery contains masterpieces amassed by the powerful and wealthy (understatement of the century) Medici clan.

Uffizi Gallery1

Works by the who’s who of Italian art, such as Titian, Caravaggio, Giotto and yes, all the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all reside here. The true revelation for me here was Botticelli; though I felt as if I’d seen The Birth of Venus a hundred times in pop culture, nothing prepared me for the impact of the real thing. (Plus: you can get a lot closer to Venus than you can to Mona Lisa.)

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Top tips: book tickets ahead at the Musei Firenze website to skip the queue, which can stretch for hours. The site is slow, but totally worth it. Allot at least three hours to soak up the full wealth and wonder of the Renaissance. Be prepared for Stendhal syndrome (as I experienced at the Vatican Museum); it’s best not to schedule anything visually heavy before or after. You’ll need your eyeballs rested for this one.

Also, the Uffizi Gallery has the best, biggest museum bookshop I’ve been in—not just for art and architecture, but also a great selection of kids’ literature, fiction and nonfiction.

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Posted on June 21, 2012
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Pergamon Museum: marble & man-bags in Berlin

Sometimes, stupidity can result in happy accidents. It’s rare, but it happens… and it happened to me in Berlin.

Focused entirely on the warm weekend to come, I was completely, stupidly underdressed for the first two days of my trip. I knew I should be out seeing the city, but was grumpy at the thought of being cold. “Let’s go to a museum,” suggested my clever husband, who is always highly invested in preventing my grumpiness.

So we chose to visit the Pergamon Museum, which stands at the tip of Museuminsel, an island on the river Spree that houses five museums and is on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Berlin Pergamon Museum

The Pergamon Museum is probably not a top-of-mind name like the Louvre in Paris or the Met in New York. It houses no famous masterpieces or household names in art. That doesn’t make it any less breathtaking. In fact, I’d say it was of the most awe-inspiring museum experiences I’ve had.

What the Pergamon Museum does have are monumental reconstructions of ancient buildings—such as its showpiece, the Pergamon Altar. The little rectangle on the map marked simply “Altar Room” could not have prepared me for this.

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Posted on May 25, 2012
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Mucha on my mind

How was your Easter weekend? Mine was quiet and laid-back, made all the better by the company of a wonderful guest from home.
Just one last Prague post before I move on. I couldn’t leave Prague without having paid a visit to the Mucha Museum, which houses the major works of one of my favorite artists, Alphonse Mucha.
One of my favorite coloring books when I was a kid was my Art Nouveau stained glass coloring book from Goodwill Bookstore. To this day, I love Art Nouveau, and Mucha is Art Nouveau.
Dance (public domain)
When I started working at GMA, I considered it destiny that I ended up in an office where the glass walls of the pantry were plastered with a huge mural of Mucha’s Dance (above). I managed to transmit my Mucha fixation to my work partner Charlie, an insanely talented art director who also tended to obsession. Mucha’s Dance became the jump-off point for a slew of Art Nouveau-inspired outdoor and print materials for a big account that took over our lives. I wish I kept copies of Charlie’s work, it was all so gorgeous.

Mucha’s work is not high art, but it is beautiful. Though he painted, most of his work was fairly commercial: from theater posters to advertisements for champagne and milk to biscuit tins. Many examples of his work, like Spring, Grapes, the poster for Lorenzaccio, and The Slav Epic (all of which I saw at the museum) today are in the public domain.

It was amazing to come face to face with works that I had only seen as small pictures in books, and realize that they are actually HUGE. Unfortunately, pictures are not allowed inside the Mucha Museum. So I had to settle for taking photos outside. That day, I was in “simple girl” mode with the Longchamp bag and ponytail, although I would hope the Marni for H&M top elevates it somewhat.
I took home a few postcards of my favorite works.

My favorite souvenir, though, was this handmade notebook. I love notebooks, so this was perfect for me. But it was also very unusual in that it harbored a few hidden treasures. Click on through to peek inside…


Details from Mucha pieces are stencilled and printed inside.

Random quotes are stamped inside. This one about writing called to me, naturally.

What I really loved, though were the pages from old Czech books, together with vintage Czech photos, that were bound with the blank pages. And at the very end, snail mail from the sixties.

It was the perfect purchase: Mucha’s art and a trip to a Prague flea market all bound up in one neat, locally handmade package. If only more museum shop souvenirs were this creative!

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Posted on April 9, 2012
Category: Shopping & Finds, Wanderlust · Labels: , , , , , ,

Antwerp by day, Antwerp by night

Marlon and I recently had a weekend visit from his cousin Yeho, who lives in Heidelberg, Germany. At her behest (and with her car), we drove down to Antwerp for the day. I’ve always wanted to go, and the car was the catalyst for me to finally overcome my inertia. Clocking in at just 2.5 hours, it’s a really easy drive. Yes, Belgium is the new Batangas.

We left at around noon and arrived in the center of town in time for a late lunch, and started the drive back a little after dinnertime. Having two meals in Antwerp was of paramount importance, since Belgium smacks the Netherlands to the ground in terms of cuisine.

For me, a visit to Belgium is not complete without a large pot of mussels, a Belgian beer, and a fantastic dessert—usually a dame blanche (“white lady”), a childhood favorite of mine and the Belgian equivalent of a hot fudge sundae. Some say it’s a Catholic vs Protestant thing, while others ascribe it to proximity to France, but whatever the reason is, I am gobsmacked by how meals can be so radically different just across the border!

In between meals, we strolled, shopped and saw a few sights. With only a few hours at our disposal, we barely scratched the surface. Luckily, we were parked right in the center of town, so leaving the car in the afternoon and returning to it at in the evening gave us the opportunity to see some of Antwerp’s iconic buildings in two distinct lights.

The Cathedral of Our Lady was closed, so we missed out on some of Peter Paul Rubens’ most famous works housed within. We did get nice day vs night views of this impressive Gothic structure…

… as well Grote Markt, or Old Market Square. It was a smaller-scale version of Brussels’ Grand Place, with similar gabled guild houses. A big difference is in what it’s called; I didn’t see any signs pointing to a Grand Place here. Being so close to the Netherlands, Dutch is more widely spoken in Antwerp than French; our smattering of Nederlands actually helped us get around and read menus. Here’s the Grote Markt by day… 
… and by night. If the perpetual rain is good for anything, it’s for making cobblestones gleam. 
On one side of the Grote Markt is the Stadhuis, or City Hall. Again, by day… 
… and by night. 
Driving into the city, our curiosities were piqued by this stunning building. It turned out to be the Museum aan de Stroom, or MAS, a museum about the city of Antwerp “and its relationship with the world.”  (Iiiiiinteresting.) Built by famous Belgian architects Neutelings Riedijk, Antwerp’s history as an important port city inspired this design of shipping containers stacked in a spiral. We returned in the evening, but the museum was already closed; this definitely warrants a return trip! 

Fortunately, the surrounding quayside, Het Eilandje (“The Islet”), was also a good area to end up in, being a former port area with interesting bars and restaurants. It was hard to get into a restaurant without a reservation, but we managed to find a table at a great bar called Het Duvels Genot (literally, “The Duvel Enjoyment”… kind of like the Heineken Experience, I guess). 
I’ve learned to expect crappy food when I walk into a bar in Amsterdam, but Belgium thoroughly has a leg up in this area. We had an awesome meal cooked with a variety of beers from the Duvel brewery, with hearty portions and reasonable prices. It was another one of those times where I was so involved with my food, I totally forgot to take pictures. Definitely a good reason (of many!) to make a return trip.

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Posted on March 1, 2012
Category: Food & Drink, Wanderlust · Labels: , , , , , ,

From Borghese to Trevi

From a superturbocharged first day, our level of activity slowed down with each passing day we spent in Rome. We became less ambitious with each day’s itinerary, hitting the snooze button more times and dawdling longer and longer in our blessedly cool, thick-walled, marble-tiled apartment. 
So by the time our fourth day rolled around, it was nearly lunchtime by the time we set off for Villa Borghese, the sprawling gardens-turned-public park that once belonged to the powerful and wealthy Borghese family. We stopped for lunch at the Piazza del Popolo.

The Galleria Borghese was the “party house” of Scipione Borghese, a nephew of Pope Paul V. Borghese used his wealth and influence to amass a truly stunning collection of art. I was excited to finally see the works of artists I had only seen in books, such as Caravaggio, Titian, Raphael and Rubens.

Tickets for the museum need to be reserved well in advance over the phone. An Italian colleague of Marlon’s had helped us call the Galleria Borghese to reserve tickets for that day’s 1 to 3pm time slot. The administration is strict and will shoo everyone out after the allotted 2 hours are over.

The Galleria Borghese is simply jawdropping from the first step in. Unfortunately, photography is forbidden—but if it wasn’t, I’d be all over it with my camera.

Scipione Borghese was one of the earliest patrons of master sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, whose signature is all over Rome. It was in Galleria Borghese that I came face to face with the true genius of Bernini. His Apollo and Daphne is, without exaggeration, the most beautifully sculpted piece of art I’ve ever seen in my life. I must have spent half an hour just looking at it, and could have easily stayed longer. 
His Pluto and Proserpina in the next room is completely different, but just as captivating.

Photos from the Galleria Borghese website—they simply don’t do them justice!
After our museum visit, Marlon and I decided to just take it easy and cool off under the shade of the trees around the Villa Borghese. 

Our curiosity was piqued by the small, funny “tandem bike” buggies that rattled by us every now and then. “That looks like fun!” Marlon said. So we had to give it a try.

The buggies turned out to be electric riscios (rickshaws), that, along with regular bikes, can be rented on an hourly basis. 

Marlon and I rattled around the park for a good 45 minutes or so until we spotted something so tempting, we just had to park our riscio, get down and enjoy it.

A public fountain! After four days of broiling heat and constant walking, I can’t tell you what a treat it was to perch on the lip of this fountain and dip my poor footsies into this clear, ice-cold water. It is a miracle of Rome that the water in its fountains is always shockingly cold no matter how hot it gets.

I was obviously not the only one who felt this way. But I just couldn’t bring myself to take it to the next level!

Refreshed and rejuvenated, we returned the riscio and headed to the Piazza Spagna, or the famous Spanish Steps, starting all the way at the top for a sweeping view…

… stopping for a photo op, naturally…

… until we ended up all the way at the bottom, with the rest of the 48,000 tourists and their mothers who were there. #mobbed

Everyone was taking photos of this fountain just because it was there, so I did too. #sheep

Just a few streets away was the great granddaddy of all fountains, the Trevi. I didn’t expect it to be so… BIG!

The Trevi Fountain was completely mobbed, too. The crowd was overwhelming, so I just found an empty spot to sit down for a while before even taking a single picture. I may have lost count of how many people did the “tossing a coin into the fountain” pose, but I give all them an O for Originality!

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Posted on October 5, 2011
Category: Wanderlust · Labels: , , , , ,

Night at the Musei

Just for peak season this year (Easter till early fall), the Vatican Museums opened their doors to the public on Friday nights. What used to be a very expensive privilege became a brilliant way for Marlon and I to beat the debilitating daytime heat and experience the Museums in an unusual way.
So I signed us up for a two-hour night tour of the highlights with an official Musei Vaticani guide. At €24, tickets from the Musei Vaticani website itself were the cheapest ones around. We were lucky to nab tickets only days before our visit.

Our official Vatican guide, Alexandra, was not only extremely knowledgeable and thorough, she also had amazing voluminous hair despite looking rather dead on her feet at 10pm. 

The Musei Vaticani house the vast art collection of the Catholic Church, a treasure trove that’s been amassed over centuries.

The magnitude of the collection is mind-boggling in itself. The Museum’s various galleries (only some of which are open at night) hold everything from ancient sculptures and priceless paintings, to more unusual things like maps and tapestries. 
Not all the art was centuries old. We only just breezed through the contemporary section, but I glimpsed large-scale works by the likes of Dali and Matisse, among many others. 
If you think the art is overwhelming, the decoration and ornamentation of the galleries themselves will make your head spin. By the end of the evening, I literally felt like my eyeballs were going to pop out (it’s a very… interesting feeling). There is art in every possible nook and cranny, masterpieces everywhere from floor…
… to ceiling.

My friend Jec asked, “Is it more mind-boggling than Versailles?” I snorted. The Vatican Museums make Versailles look positively minimalist.
And yes, I had to wrestle with that a bit. After my very emotional afternoon at St. Peter’s, thinking about the value of the art and—oh, you know this one—how much good it can do for the suffering of the world brought me crashing down. 
I know any of us in such a position to amass all these these treasures would keep them for as long as we possibly could. But this is an all too human instinct from a Church that professes to be divine. I wonder if a Musei Vaticani auction is something we will ever see in our lifetime. 
Since they are not exactly easy to sell, the masterpieces that are fixed to the buildings themselves are somewhat easier to think about. 
These are some of the Vatican Museums’ greatest treasures: ceilings and walls adorned with frescoes by Raphael.
I was glad to have my wide-angle lens, but these pictures cannot even come close to doing these ceilings justice.
How Raphael brought theology, history and even mathematics and philosophy together in his art was simply genius.

At the point where my eyeballs were about to fall out of their sockets, we entered the world’s most famous chapel with the world’s most famous ceiling. I managed to snap this photo before I saw the sign forbidding photography. 
It’s just as well that photography is not allowed; sometimes we forget to experience things with our own eyes, and not through a viewfinder or lens.

So I just threw my head back and stayed that way, eyes glued to the ceiling, for about 20 whole minutes. I tried to drink in as many details as I could. I simply didn’t want to forget. And I don’t think I ever will.

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Posted on October 3, 2011
Category: Wanderlust · Labels: , , , , ,

Round and round we go

One of the smaller museums that I’ve missed on my previous Paris trips was the Musee L’Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries. It was an oversight that I was happy to correct on this visit.

Marlon, Gutsy and I were welcomed by Rodin’s The Kiss right outside the museum door. It’s the third I’ve seen, after the ones at the Musee Rodin and the sculpture garden in Martigny.

The centerpieces of the Musee L’Orangerie are a pair of tranquil white oval-shaped rooms that house Monet’s famous paintings of water lilies, Les Nympheas.

Six of about 250 paintings by Monet on the same theme are housed here.

Something about the scale of the paintings, or maybe the peace and beauty of its subjects, made the mood in these round halls somewhat contemplative.

The visitors remind me of people watching films on a panoramic screen… except it’s not the images that change, but what you’re thinking about them.

I was just glad that the rooms were cool and quiet, making them a perfect place to hide from the hot sun. I’m learning to love it when the sun is out, but too much still annoys me. Yes, I’m still Asian.
Downstairs was a collection of mostly impressionist paintings, including works from Cezanne, Modigliani, Matisse, Monet and others. The one I liked the most was this portrait of Coco Chanel by the artist Marie Laurencin.

It was annoyingly hot outside, so we scrapped our plan to go walking around the gardens after the museum. Instead, we repaired to Laduree, which was just a few minutes away.

I’d been to Laduree once before with Gutsy and Tria, in 2006. But I couldn’t afford more than just a coffee back then. Not even one of Laduree’s famed macarons.

This time, I had a lime-vanilla sorbet… with a fleur de sel (salted caramel) macaron. Both of them were absolutely divine: so light and sweet, flavorful without being overpowering.

Marlon immortalized my first bite of Laduree’s famous macarons on camera. Each bite was definitely a mmm-mmm-mmmmoment. 

In addition to the fleur de sel, Gutsy and I also shared a pistachio and an orange blossom macaron.

After the oval rooms at L’Orangerie, I guess you could say that round shapes were the theme of the day!

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Posted on June 15, 2011
Category: Food & Drink, Wanderlust · Labels: , , , , , ,

A tale of two artists

Norway’s two most famous artists, painter/printmaker Edvard Munch and sculptor Gustav Vigeland, were not only contemporaries, but bitter rivals. Munch, whose famous painting The Scream may have given him a leg up over Vigeland in death, was quoted to have forbidden a single cent of the taxes he paid to the state to be used for the construction of Vigelands Park, filled with over 200 sculptures by his nemesis, in 1921.

It was a gloomy, rainy afternoon when Marlon, my sister and I visited the Munch Museum in Oslo.

The weather turned out to be perfectly suited to Munch’s works. His paintings, and the prints he made of them, are filled with anguish, despair, betrayal, and life’s darkest colors. In Munch’s world, lovers only leave and betray; jealousy turns men into hollow-eyed corpses. Pretty heavy stuff for a Sunday afternoon.

Yet amidst the darkness of his worldview, some bright spots stand out vividly.


“The Seducer”… but who is seducing whom?

We saw some of his most famous works, such as his Madonna…

… and The Scream, which was accompanied by his journal entry about the evening that inspired the painting.

Munch was what we would today call a multimedia artist: he not only painted, but made prints, took photographs and films, and wrote about his work. “It was a Time during which Life had ripped open my Soul,” wrote Munch. “I felt a huge Scream—and I really did hear a huge Scream…”

Munch’s world is definitely not a pretty place. But the power he has to draw you into it, to mesmerize you with pain and paint, cannot but be admired.


Consolation and The Death of Marat, my favorites from this museum

In contrast, it was a bright, sunny day when we went to Vigelands Park, a park dedicated to Munch’s most bitter rival.

At first, Vigeland seems to be the antithesis of Munch. His figures play, leap, laugh and run, with joy coursing through bones, muscles and veins of bronze. Set against a brilliant blue sky, this boundless energy and happiness was a bit of a relief after Munch, to be honest.

But walk deeper into the park and happiness slowly begins to acquire a darker, deeper tinge. Mingling  with loving embraces and tender gazes…

are scenes of frustration, punishment…

… even desperation.

By filling the park with 212 statues, Vigeland is able to show a wide range of life’s nuances and subtleties, at every stage of life from birth to death.

With so many sculptures, every visitor is bound to find something that speaks to him or her intimately.

For me, what I noticed most were the sculptures of babies. Maybe it’s because of where I am right now in life: having a baby is on my mind a lot these days, and while I’m not 100% ready for it, I am looking forward to that next chapter. At first, it seems Vigeland does not provide encouragement to would-be parents.

Scary, right? I found the sculpture of the baby gagging his mother with her hair particularly disturbing. Overwhelmed and overrun, these parents echo the stories my mom friends have told me about the early days of motherhood, and I can’t help but feel apprehensive.

But then with one piece, Vigeland wiped that all away. This one piece, with all its tenderness and strength, told me to go for it anyway. That maybe, in the midst of all my questions and apprehensions, I would find something that would make it all worth it.

I can’t help but think that Munch speaks to my gaga-for-love days of yore, while Vigelands speaks to who I am now, and maybe who I am about to become. These rivals may have been at odds in their own lives, but somehow, set against the lives of those who behold their work, they have found a way to complement one other.

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Posted on June 4, 2011
Category: Wanderlust · Labels: , , , , , ,

Sibling revelry

A week before Easter, Marlon and I welcomed our first official houseguest in the person of my sister, Sheila. 
Many awesome things transpired during, and because of, her visit. First and foremost among them was the cleanup of the spare bedroom, and its transformation from disaster area/dumping ground for assorted junk into a hospitable and rather pretty guest space.

I loved being able to finally do girly things, things that I’ve learned not to foist on Marlon. Such as hours upon hours of window shopping…

Loved this gold bag by A.P.C. Hope to find it at the A.P.C. outlet in Paree!
Move over, Kate Moss… make way for Kate Mouse!

… during which, naturally, some actual shopping also took place.
 My new suede shoes: comfy lace-up sandal/booties from Bershka

Our girly pursuits also extended to gratuitous camwhoring…

Huli ka, Ate!
… and camwhoring’s style blog-inspired subset, known as outfit shots. It was so nice to just go “Outfit shot!” without reservation and have someone automatically know what to do. I haven’t trained the husband in this area yet. Nahihiya pa ako. But with a sister, hiya does not apply.
Outfit shot! on Prinsengracht
Outfit shot! at Museumplein

Outfit shot! in the Jordaan

Finally, it wouldn’t have been a girly week without our shared appreciation of the many… er, ways that Amsterdam is superior to Singapore, KL and Oslo (all cities we’ve lived in). We didn’t agree though on whether or not it is superior to Manila in terms of eye candy. 
 Ben Affleck isdatchu? Maybe 10 years from now!

From the tram rides to the police at Schiphol airport, the Dutch men did not disappoint. It must have been the weather! Salamat, mga ginoo, at di naman ako napahiya sa aking bisita.

Kikay pursuits aside, it was great to just show my sister around my new home, my new life, and take her to some places that have become fast favorites in the four months that I’ve lived in Amsterdam.

Lipsmackingly authentic Chinese food at Nam Kee in Zeedijk 
(complete with MSG headache!)
Dutch design for your home at Moooi Gallery, 
merchandised with playfulness and panache 

The yummiest (refillable!) giant margaritas, 
caramel crepes and Mexican grub at Los Pilones
Green serenity at the Begijnhof, a 14th-century courtyard tucked into the busy Spui 
Lazy sun-drenched afternoon at the Vondelpark with a good book
Steak and lobster at Restaurant Red on Keizersgracht

Having my sister around also gave me a great excuse to go out, explore the city, and discover some new favorites. Call me weird, but I prefer to keep my exploring down to a minimum when Marlon is at work. He gets so envious (not that he stops me), I end up feeling sorry for the poor guy—what with me out and about in this gorgeous city while he has to stay cooped up in the office all day, 5 days a week.

 Apres Anne Frank House, La Perla’s crisp wood-fired pizzas

 Enjoying an appeltart, coffee and sunshine at Cafe P96, a boat cafe on Prinsengracht
 The Friday book market at the Spui

Besides, going out and exploring is just so much more fun with company. So I (and Marlon, on the weekend) went on the tourist trail for the first time since moving here and finally got to tick off some tourist staples.

 Requisite tourist photo at Dam Square

 Amsterdam’s ‘floating’ flower market, the Bloemenmarkt




 Rediscovering a girlhood heroine at the Anne Frank House

 After the Rijksmuseum, camwhoring at the giant Iamsterdam sign in Museumplein

Day trip to Keukenhof, Holland’s famous (and eye-popping!) tulip garden

Whew! Ang dami pala naming nagawa! Not bad considering we never left the house before lunchtime, in true Paul fashion.

It’s funny, I was doing the hosting (okay, with significant help from Marlon, haha) but I really have to say thank you, Ate! It was so much fun having you here!

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Posted on May 4, 2011
Category: Life in Amsterdam · Labels: , , , , ,