The Sweet Bag of the Busy Bee

When I have a moment to spare in Gouda I enjoy visiting my local thrift shops; I find it very relaxing and perhaps reassuring walking around looking at a great deal of things I would not like either to purchase or see in my house, not even as gifts from my best intentioned friends and kind acquaintances. Yes, I can then revel at how marvelously lucky I am to have friends with good taste as my eyes linger on a blue and white ashtray from Crete or large wooden pieces of cutlery. Sometimes, depending on the season, I might manage to get to such a store once a week -- when and where I may dump my own unwanted household items. But of course realistically speaking I don’t often come away empty handed.

Once day, when at a second hand store some years back, I happened to admire a small black and white sketch of a winter scene in an old fashioned frame. I decided to purchase the item and while walking to the counter I picked up a small pot. It had a chip near the bottom. The owner of this particular thrift shop was not from Gouda. She sniffed at the strange little pot and then gave me both the pot and the sketch for the price of the picture. I was rather pleased. I had now a little memento of Gouda’s past with “plateel” which is presently holding pens and pencils on the piano. (The sketch hangs over the piano.) On the bottom of the pot is the mark for the date and the maker. It’s not a type of design to the taste of everyone. It’s what one might call a little garish and screams at you from the rollicking 1920’s. Gouda used to make quite a lot of these types of pots among lots of other pots, some more demure. Potteries were a big industry around here and young people would go straight out of school to work in the factories. There’s a very nice website (in Dutch) which tells what it was like to work in the pot business.

In honor of the pottery past of the city Gouda holds a ceramic festival every year. It’s international. This year it’s being held during the 17th and 18th of May. Stands are set up all over the market square for modern artists from near and far. “The Bee’s Tour of Gouda Buzzing Through Vinita’s Lens” will be there too selling our arty and useful guide book. Come by and have a chat with us, we'd love to see you! We’ve even gotten out of the old jail. That’s a joke…the old jail is now the local radio station which was kind enough to ask us in for an interview to talk about our book and showed us the old cell bars.

While the “Keramiek Dagen” (Pottery Festival) is over after two days, there is another art event happening in Gouda which is rather interesting. It started this week. The GoudA Museum has showcased well selected Gouda artists in a “Salon” exposition and is selling the works promising to sell to anyone under 18 a (pre- selected – the museum’s selection I might add) work of art for a mere 25 Euros. So any young person looking to start their art collection has a chance to set a foot in the market. Happy hunting!

Growing up in Northern California historical houses were those that had been built about hundred years previously, namely in the late 19th century or early 20th century after the earthquake and fire of 1908. There weren’t many of these older houses hanging about in my neighborhood but across the Bay in San Francisco there were rows of these Victorian fancy cake homes. And rows of plainer fronted ones as well. Sometimes people we knew lived in one of them (usually a plainer non renovated home) and we’d visit, walking up sets of haphazardly built wooden staircases, shuffling over the worn wooden floors down extremely long hallways, narrow and dark. Rooms, sets of them, offering little privacy from each other were without modern divisions or planning to rank family life as we know it today. Their main features were large bay windows set in the wooden front that looked over the street careening away from our eyes heading down a steep hill.

Here in Gouda, a quaint Dutch city, you can purchase a historical monument quite a bit older than those Victorian houses. Take for instance the 16th century house whose cellar was once used to store ice for the city. A few years back it was bought and renovated as a home and is now again on sale. Last year for Art Moment Day (“Kunstmoment” in Dutch) there was an exhibition in the building so I walked into the cool arched space with ancient floor tiles and thick white walls and frankly the place took my breath away. The atmosphere was enchanting; it is one of the few older houses still standing today out of all the ones that once surrounded St. John’s Church. Most were torn down during renovations of the church in 1917. The down side of owning a 16th century ice house is that it is placed in the shadow of St. John’s on the cooler side of the church.

The GoudA Museum has taken down its exhibition of the cartoons of the stained glass windows in St. John’s Church and is starting to furnish a room in a new theme: the city of Gouda. They have commissioned a maquette of the city based on an early map of Gouda, the important one produced in 1562 after the fire that destroyed the church. To raise funding for the maquette the museum has set up a website where anyone can go on line and virtually buy property in Gouda. First go to www.gouda1562.nl then click on a red icon to buy a house. There are other items for sale as well a bridge, a convent, a hotel, a harbor crane, trees, etc. and also street dogs. The dogs are quite cheap and plentiful in the 1500’s. What the hell buy a 16th century dog – put him in your shopping cart “winkelwagen”. When you’ve finished shopping click “Kopen”, then you fill in the form and pay (make a donation to the project). The site is interesting and interactive so click away and discover Gouda! (Remember there’s always google translate to help you navigate the other Dutch language bits.)

For Queen’s Day this year ‘The Bee’s Tour of Gouda Buzzing Through Vinita’s Lens” was on the Raam selling copies. The Raam is a long street in Gouda where the annual garage sale takes place on April 30th. (I really ought to do a piece on this street one day, but not just now to keep this post short.) We had great reactions from the citizens of Gouda on that sunny day and also we continue to have a lot interest on our Facebook site for the book. We even had a wonderful review in Expatica, a website supporting expats in Holland. We were thrilled and delighted!

Once upon a time there was a little town in the south of France called Orange. Actually the Romans used to like to hang out there so it could be viewed as more of a big run down town. One day Frederick the 1st upgraded his rating of the place, kind of like giving a Michelin star to a restaurant and investing in the stock market value at the same time. He could do this because he was The Holy Roman Emperor, a job basically comprised of running most of Europe and overriding everyone’s objections. Fred sported a red colored beard which may explain his affinity for Orange but it really had nothing to do with the matter in 1163. Frederick spent a great deal of time marching around Europe trying to calm uprisings and consolidating his vast realm. He had a lot of energy and this came in handy considering the task at hand. Good old “Barbarossa”, as he was known!

Despite the new rating the principality (or fiefdom) of Orange would have to wait four centuries before anything interesting really happened. It’s a pity so many interesting things could have happened. But they didn’t. And then finally a not very exciting thing happened: Rene de Chalon died. He died childless. And the foolish man wasn’t basking in the sun in the south of France. He was living in Breda, a city that now is in The Netherlands and the year was 1544. God only knows what was actually happening in Orange down in France but apart from the title which had migrated north, the place itself pretty much looses focus in our story.

And so my friends, this is why The Netherlands gets dressed up in the color of orange on Queen’s Day and holds a giant garage sale/party at the end of April. You see the person who inherited the title of the House of Orange from Rene de Chalon was a distant relative William of Nassau who then called himself William of Orange-Nassau. It has more of a ring to it, you’ll agree. William of Orange-Nassau did something extraordinary – he founded the Dutch Republic and was quickly assassinated. But no matter he set the whole thing up.

This year on April 30th for the first time ever, I’ll be behind the table -- instead of in front shopping – I’ll be selling, you guessed it, our guide book of Gouda “The Bee’s Tour of Gouda Buzzing Through Vinita’s Lens”. Vinita will be there too working hard, although I thought for a moment she might not choose to acknowledge my email saying we’re starting at 7 am, and of course we’ll be in orange on Gouda's street called the Raam..

Gouda’s “Art Moment” route is a successful springtime adventure out through the historical city center’s streets into galleries, homes and special spaces. Art lovers everywhere look for experiences that express thoughts and emotions through color, structure, composition. I heard an acquaintance recently remark that when they meet someone, they associate that person with a color. Often the color relates to a letter of the alphabet. “Orange,” my musician friend expounded on her theory thoughtfully, “is a good color and means that that person is interesting to me. And usually their name starts with M.” I must admit I hadn’t ever made such connections between color, memory and people’s names. It’s complex - how our memories and our brain patterns work. A robot will never be quite able to do the things that our complicated human system can achieve. It’s quite obvious when watching a robot play the violin on YouTube for instance; it’s obnoxious to think that a robot could produce the unique part of a human’s individual soul that sings out to us while a musician plays the violin at one precise moment in time, an experience that is never entirely repeated in the same manner or feeling again.

We should be aware of our thoughts, and let them take us places through our past and perhaps into our future desires. “I would not allow my work to imitate life. That should be expressed. “ Vania Pentcheva, artist. Vania’s art is exhibited at Lugth Art, on Turfmarkt in Gouda.

The Art Moment took place during the weekend of the 14 and 15 of April 2012. However don’t despair: you can always take a walk through Gouda! “The Bee’s Tour of Gouda Buzzing Through Vinita’s Lens” is a unique guide book, a walking guide book, that leads a visitor through the beautiful city center Gouda and prepares them for a visit to see and understand what the enormous stained glass windows in St. John’s Church are talking about, however there are options given if you prefer remaining outdoors. Cafes and rest points are indicated throughout the self guided tour. An online folder about the book is available right here, and a fifteen page preview of the book is found over here.

Weekend away - here's a list of hotels and B&Bs inside Gouda's city center.

One evening passing under an arched passage way in a thick wall on our way to dinner, I noted that the Santa Catalina Hotel was next door to the Nestor Museum which I had read was not worth visiting on one of those messy tourist sites that tries to sell you hotel rooms. This was proclaimed by an earnest tourist who had “expected more”. I made a point of informing my spouse that should we continue to walk in a straight line towards the old city center we’d pass some single storied historical houses occupied by modern ladies of the night, their charms hanging over the open window frames in limited spandex. We ended up at a tavern, the front tilted and tiled in glittering 1910 avocado green, full of locals watching the soccer game on a large tv, eating tapas in our exhausted state dining “early” in the Canary Islands at 9 pm. Seeing that they offered a sorbet desert with vodka I decided on a cementing good night’s sleep and ordered up. The next day didn’t see my curiosity drive far from base. I figured that after a refreshing swim in the pool, I’d check out next door, after all the museum website said that the entrance fee was a mere two Euros. And so I came to disturb the nice young arty looking fellow from his occupation of surfing behind a computer screen in the hallway. He looked startled to see me. I asked for a ticket. “That will be fifty cents.” He said timorously. Maybe they’d reduced the price after complaints from visitors online.

Nestor, my brain spun over the name, yes associated in my world with theater most notably with respect to R. Strauss’ premiere of “Salome”. It was beginning to come back to me. “Museo Nestor” is a small place in Las Palmas devoted to the native artist but well worth the fifty cents that I forked over to cross the chill stone floors and gaze at Nestor’s “Poem of the Sea” my feet planted in the center of the circular room surrounded by low lying marble blowfish at my toes watching the wall’s humongous fish lunge from the sea, the calm sea, the tempestuous sea, the bottom of the sea, the surface of the sea, and the human figures nosed and pushed around by the sinuous sea creatures.

What I liked most was the “Poem of the Earth” series upstairs where Nestor used a throbbing couple in settings of the native fauna found on the Canary Islands, with the exception of “winter” which had no greenery. Upon returning to the hotel I noted the type of plants lining the front of the facade and I could not help but stop and feel a smooth hard leaf between my fingers on that April day, looking down in vain for the naked bodies of the man and woman rolled up in the exact same large leaf plants as depicted in Nestor’s “Primavera”.