The Rijksmuseum is open to the public again, and before we have a slew of guests come to visit I thought it might be nice to be able to speak authoritatively on how it looks after the refurbishment.
It is absolutely stunning! An amazing and wonderful world class Museum! The entry hall is a huge open atrium like the Louvre, and crowd management was excellent! Would you like to know more?
Another massive week was underway before I realised it! It’s the strangest thing that you just seem to blink and it is the beginning of another week of class and you’re wondering if you should have done your homework. (Of course I always do my homework!) Monday always seems to be a big lesson too, stuffed with as much information as possible, allowing it to ferment for a day, then you can come back on Wednesday and practice everything which should be sitting in your brain.
We jumped right in to the fray with answering questions for “how frequently” and “have you ever”. Keeping in mind that the Dutch would never simply answer with “I have” (Ik heb), you have to answer with “I do that lots” or “I do that never”. Of course the answers will differ depending on whether you are answering in the present tense or past tense (remember het perfectum) “I have never …”
The Museum of the Tropics is located on the Eastern side of Amsterdam, just past the Zoo. It is an anthropological museum which was established in 1864 as the “Colonial Museum”, but in 1949 became a part of the Tropical Institute in Amsterdam.
Himself got a day off work. Deciding to make the most of it, we planned on heading to a local medieval castle! Of course when the day dawn cold and wet (first day of summer, and Solstice don’cha’know) we decided that we’d get terrible photos and I couldn’t do that to all of you lovely readers. So plans changed and we ended up at the Oude Kerk and the World Press Photo Exhibition therein.
I’m not sure why is didn’t occur to me that the “World Press Photos” would be taken from “World Press”, and therefore mostly about War and Sports. But it didn’t, and they were. So as often as I was impressed with the technical aspects of the photos, and how much story they told, they were quite confronting and not often heart-warming stories.
Good thing for me I had other things to absorb myself into! Would you like to know more?
The astute in the audience will notice that I missed reporting on a couple of weeks in there. I was at Week 4 for the first lesson, but not the second when my back gave out, and it remained out for Week 5. Briefly, that one lesson I was at in Week 4 involved when you put an “e” at the end of verbs. The short version is that it depends on where it’s placed in the sentence (before or after the noun), whether “een” is used in prefix, and whether it is a “de” or het” word.
We moved on to listening to a grocery shopping scenario. More and more we’ve been listening to audio to acclimatise us to how fast people speak. It’s tough when you can’t ask a recording to slow down! But you’d be surprised how much you can pick up too! The goal is apparently to catch 60% of a conversation. This should be enough to respond to. So we did some “fill-in-the-blanks”, and then repeated the scripts in groups.
Then we moved on to playing “grocery shopping” under the auspices of needing to put on a dinner party for ten people. Half the class were shopping, and the other half being the shop assistants. It was fun, and loud! My partner and I were shopping for paella ingredients!
There was some work on responses, and a hand out which we went through in pairs where we were informed that “starting your response with “Dat …” creates cohesion with your conversation partner, making your Dutch sound very natural.” Something else I need to work on, obviously! Would you like to know more?
ghoti industries 