Damn they have good food here!

The new church in the suburbs of Groningen
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So it was back into the Netherlands for me. I arrived mid morning in Groningen. I had been going to arrive later but had woken early and decided to try and catch the earlier train (a decision I regretted as I rushed to the train station with all my bags).

Groningen is one of the largest towns in the north of the Netherlands and has a large university. Other than that it is most well known for its museum which is in the rather strange looking modern building in the middle of the canal as you come out of the train station. It’s definitely not something that you can miss.

Part of Groningen museum. It's on an island near the train station and has three sections each designed by a different architect.
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The centre manages to pack a lot of streets and a couple of very large squares into not very much space at all and I traversed this to get to the hostel. The hostel is just out of the other side of the main town to the train station and about 30 minutes walk. Luckily, my room was ready and I could take all my stuff upstairs. I had decided to treat myself to a single room for a couple of nights (a decision I’m now very grateful for as on my second night a very large sports team checked in!). I didn’t hang around long but worked out a plan of attack and headed off.

This interesting object was used to blow tobacco smoke up the bum of drowned people. Supposedly it brought some of them back to life
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There seems to be something about the border because despite all the rain on the German side, every time I cross over into the Netherlands, it seems to be sunny. I’m sure that the Dutch would refute this though. I walked around the main sights in the centre of town of which there really aren’t all that many. The church is the most obvious as you can see it for miles around (it is really very flat here). It is supposedly one of the best church towers in all of the Netherlands and I must say that it doesn’t promise much for the towers of the south. It’s not that attractive. The church was closed when I went there so I didn’t get to see the inside at all. The square behind the church is really lovely even though it’s dug up at the moment for them to lay new turf. It’s lined by lots of cute buildings including the Provincial house and the Prinzenhof. It would be a lovely place to sit if it weren’t for all the dirt and the diggers and people with shovels.

The gold office is one of the few interesting older buildings in Groningen
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The Grote Markt is the old market square and it’s not really all that appealing. It’s home to the town hall which is a large neoclassical building from the 19^th century and is large and brick-like in the middle of the square. The side of the square opposite has mostly modern buildings and large signs for beer. Behind the town hall is really the only attractive building in this square and that’s the Goudkantor (gold office) from the 17^th century. It’s now home to an expensive restaurant but the outside has been nicely restored.

War Memorial in Groningen
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I continued through to the much nicer, Vismarkt which is only a couple of streets away. It’s a long thin square with lots of nice buildings still left on the southern side. In the middle of the square at one end are the treasury building (built around the same time as the town hall by the looks of it) and the A church (that’s actually its name, A-kerk) which is quite attractive on the outside but also locked when I went there. I couldn’t find any signs with opening times so maybe it’s only open for services.

Canals in central Groningen
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I was starting to get hungry so headed to one of the Lonely Planet recommendations, a place called Puur. They did really really good sandwiches and the service was quick and the food fresh. Feeling much better for something to eat, I headed back out and decided to head to the museum. It’s not really a museum but an art gallery with a small permanent collection and a large space for temporary exhibitions. The exhibition at the moment is of JW Waterhouse and they have brought pieces from all over the world including quite a few pieces from private collections. It’s very popular and there were lots of people in there. I was pleased to have the museum card as it dropped the price from 10 to 2 euros. For all the bizarreness of the museum’s exterior most of the inside is a fairly ordinary museum and you wouldn’t guess what the rest of the building looks like.

This is the treasury building with the A Kerk in the background.
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The collection was very nice and they had a good collection of his sketchbooks and preparatory sketches for the larger pieces which were very interesting. The paintings are almost sad though. There is something so lost about the expressions of the subjects. The video on his life is worth watching and thankfully was in English with subtitles so I could understand it without having to guess every 4^th word.

The permanent collection is diverse. There is a section upstairs that is paid for by a foundation and is a mixture of modern and older pieces. It has all sorts of stuff: mirrors, tapestries, portraits, a very interesting set of Andy Warhol’s sketches (mostly of men getting oral sex), teapots, prints. It really does have it all. There is also a collection of china which is interestingly displayed in a room that is full of white curtains so that you can only see part of the display at any one time. There is also a collection of modern abstract painting and photography. I’m wondering too after seeing the portrait collection what happened to the gene pool in the Netherlands since the  17^th century. Because they really were unfortunately looking people then. I know that the daggy clothes and the dour expressions didn’t help but they weren’t exactly next top models. And yet the current Netherlands seems to be full of attractive people. Where did the good genes come from?

This is the very unimpressive town hall in Groningen
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After the museum, I felt in need of some more sustenance so headed to a place on the Vismarkt that does apple pie/cake. You can see them in the window and they look very very good and the smell wafts out into the square. It really is hard to resist and I can verify that they do taste as good as they look. And I even managed to order in Dutch.

With a full belly again, I continued onto the other main museum in town which is the shipping museum and the attached tobacco museum. These are free with the museum card and if they hadn’t been I might not have bothered going. It is quite interesting though and the houses are worth seeing. All of the signs are pretty much in Dutch so I’m not sure of all the stories that are on the walls. They have a little hand out in English that gives you the basic theme of each room. It basically covers the history of shipping in the area all the way through to the present. It has a massive collection of model ships that date back to the 1920s as well as bits and pieces off the real boats. They have several replica rooms from ships and models of shipyards and rope making and all sorts of things. It’s all stored in a pair of houses, one from the 15^th century and the other from the 19^th century and they are real rabbit warrens. The ceilings are so low in some of the rooms that I could easily touch the ceiling so watch yourself if you are tall.

The tobacco museum covers the history of smoking from the use of tobacco by the natives in South America, its introduction into Europe and its increasing popularity. One of the best exhibits is a device that is used to blow smoke up the bottom of men who have drowned. It supposedly works. They have lots of pipes and snuff boxes and other smoking related items. They have some interesting equipment from when cigarettes and cigars were made by hand using presses. I hadn’t really though about how they were made pre machines.

After coming out of the museum, I headed back to the tourist info office to check the times for buses to Bourtange for the morning. It was lucky that I did because I ended up with much better connections and not having to get up and be at the train station before 7am. They were very helpful in the tourist office, so a big thumbs up for them. I also know of a good site for working out connections for public transport now. Unfortunately  it’s only in Dutch but it’s reasonably easy to work out. It’s www.9292ov.nl and you just have to put in the departure point and the destination and when you want to go and it will work out the details and tell you how much it will cost as well.

I stopped off in the little garden behind the Prizenhof which is next to one of the canals. It’s really lovely, even in the winter and I expect will be gorgeous in a few more weeks when the roses start to flower. The leaves and buds are just coming out now so it won’t be much longer. It would be a nice little peaceful spot to sit and read, I expect.

After that I headed back to the hostel and had a very quiet night watching TV in my room. It’s nice to be able to watch things in English again. I grabbed some dinner at a kebab place near to the hostel. There isn’t a kitchen here unfortunately so I had to go out.

The next day, I spent most of my time at Bourtange (see separate entry) and arrived back in the late afternoon. I hadn’t had lunch so I grabbed some fries from the Belgian Fries truck that today was in the Grote Markt (yesterday it was in the Vismarkt and it switches  between the two). They do damn good fries though they do drown them in sauce just a little bit. I’m glad I got tomato sauce rather than mayonnaise.

I’m really tired tonight so it’s going to be an early one before heading to the Hunebedden and Utrecht tomorrow.