Hi friends! I’m currently sitting in the kitchen of my LLC, eating a delicious Wednesday snail and finally enjoying a bit of time to relax. It’s been very busy because on Friday night I got back home from my long study tour.
At DIS, every core course has a long study tour around halfway through the semester. Different programs lead students all over Europe with activities and visits that supplement everything we’ve been learning in class. For the graphic design studio and foundations classes, we got to go to the Netherlands! It was such an amazing week. We didn’t waste a single minute in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Breda or Tilburg. They packed each day with visits to museums, studios and artist spaces, and also some seriously amazing food.
I loved Amsterdam. Copenhagen is still my favorite, but I think I could’ve easily spent a whole semester in that city. In many ways, it felt pretty similar to Copenhagen — there were canals, quaint buildings and tons of bikes. I think one of the stand-out differences for me, though, was all the diversity in Amsterdam. If you sit and people watch in Copenhagen, you can usually tell right away who’s a Dane and who’s not. In Amsterdam, it was much less obvious. People were much more ethnically diverse, and unlike Copenhagen, they don’t all wear black as they bike down the street.
Another big difference is how marijuana is legal and socially accepted in Amsterdam. I know this is common knowledge, but I felt like a huge idiot when we walked outside in Amsterdam and I loudly said “whoa, is that a skunk?” I personally cannot stand the smell of weed and it was definitely an adjustment to be walking around the streets and smelling it as frequently as you’d smell someone smoking a cigarette in Copenhagen. Luckily, someone clued me in that “coffee shops” in Amsterdam are places where you go do(?) weed (I know nothing about how to talk about drugs) and not places to go get a cup of coffee. Helped me avoid what could’ve been an awkward mix-up!
Because we got to do so much and I don’t want to leave anything out, I’ll give you the day-by-day rundown of my trip to Holland.
Sunday
We started the trip bright and early — sort of. It was actually so early that it was not bright at all. My friend Hana and I headed from our LLC to the airport a little after 5 in the morning. For readers at home, 5 a.m. is still totally party time in central Copenhagen. We trekked to Nørreport with our suitcases as Danes drunkenly roamed the streets. So that was an interesting start. Nothing that a huge cup of coffee and a brief nap on the plane couldn’t fix, though.
Sunday’s activities:
- FOAM (Fotomusuem Amsterdam)
- DISorientation Activity: Amsterdam
- De Culinaire Werkplaats
I wasn’t sure how I felt about the DISorientation activity at first. We had one of these in Amsterdam and one in Rotterdam, and they were basically just a short break to explore, get lunch and focus on sketching and observing the city. I often have trouble with the sketching thing, because I’m a perfectionist, and sketching on the go isn’t the ideal setting for creating something perfect. But I actually really loved this activity. I was with Lauren and Sandy for this one and we focused on observing if the Nine Streets of Amsterdam were hip or livable (we determined that they are both). We got slightly lost, but ended up having a really nice walk around the city until we found a small cafe to sit down and sketch with some tea and carrot cake.
Dinner on Sunday was truly an experience. We went to this culinary workshop where we were served a five course meal (plus tons of wine) where every course was inspired by a famous Dutch artist. We got to take turns helping plate the courses and it was an awesome and highly interactive dinner. I was wary at first, but food was a lot better and more filling than I expected!
Monday
- Frame Publishers
- Stedlijk Museum
- Van Gogh Museum
- Canal Tour
- Sampurna
Monday was probably my favorite day of activities. Our first stop was Frame magazine and it was one of my favorite stops on the whole trip. Frame magazine is beautiful and as someone who does editorial design it was cool to see how this magazine gets made in Amsterdam. The magazine only has two designers but they were super cool. It was interesting because a lot of what they were saying was really familiar to me, but they also talked a lot about things I never really thought about, such as paper quality. They use both coated and uncoated paper throughout the magazine (re: some pages are glossy and others aren’t), but they spend a lot of time strategizing what kinds of content should go on which kind of paper. The glossy pages are the ones that they put their huge photos stories on, but stories that are more text-based go best on the uncoated paper. Once they pointed it out, it was really interesting to see how much more detail you could see in photos on the coated pages and how much more readable the text was on the uncoated pages. Or maybe that’s just interesting to me, because I’m a huge nerd about this kind of thing.
After Frame, we spent some time at Museumplein. We all got a tour of the Stedlijk and then we had about 3.5 hours of free time. Mara, Kelli, Elsa and I got tickets for the Van Gogh museum (which I loved and highly recommend to anyone planning a visit to Amsterdam) and then we took some fun pictures outside the I Amsterdam sign and walked over to the Tulip markets. It was also gorgeous weather.
The rest of the evening was super relaxing. The canal tour was beautiful, and we FEASTED at Sampurna, a really great Indonesian restaurant in the city.
Tuesday
- LAVA design studio
- Eye Film Institute
- NDSM Werf Area
- Heineken Experience
LAVA design studio was so unbelievably cool. They do rebranding for international clients and we got to do a workshop where we sketched logo ideas for the project they’re working on currently. The EYE museum was really fun and interactive too, and a nice way change of pace from the other art museums we had been visiting.
We used our free time on Tuesday night to do the Heineken experience. Let me tell you, it was certainly an experience, complete with a karaoke, a bar and a 4-D movie. I’m not a big beer drinker (I always think it tastes like bad water) but I actually liked this beer. Which was good, because the tour gives you a LOT of it.
Wednesday
On Wednesday, we sadly had to leave Amsterdam. We took a bus ride with stops in Breda and Tilburg before arriving in Rotterdam for dinner. I expected to be a bit disappointed with Rotterdam, because it’s hard to top Amsterdam, but it was actually really cool. It was so different from Amsterdam that it was hard to even compare. Rotterdam is much more industrial and modern than Amsterdam. We later learned that this is because Rotterdam was bombed in WWII and most historical buildings were lost.
Wednesday’s activities:
- MOTI in Breda
- KAMU Kafe in Breda
- Graphic Design Festival Lecture in Breda
- Textiel Lab and Museum in Tilburg
- Sugo Pizza dinner in Rotterdam
The museums in Breda and Tilburg were really neat. MOTI is the Museum of Image and they had all kinds of interesting exhibits. My favorite was this one that had photos from wire services such as AP, Reuters and Getty and compared the same moments captured by photojournalists and which ones got more views and shares. From an editorial design standpoint, it was really cool, because designers are often tasked with selecting photos, and it was cool to see side by side how even the slightest change in composition or a half a second between frames can make a huge difference in a photo’s success. I also tried virtual reality at this museum which was cool at the time, but I felt dizzy afterwards and now I kind of hate it.
The dinner in Rotterdam was unbelievable. It was this little pizza place and they kept bringing out very small rounds of weird but delicious little flatbread pizzas. At first, we were all kind of confused because it didn’t seem like that much food, but they kept bringing out round after round. We were full after round 3 and thought things had to be over after round 4. But no, there were 5 rounds of pizza. I don’t want to think about how much pizza I ate. And because DIS does not skimp on meals, we were also given dessert (Nutella pizza and Tiramisu).
Thursday
- Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam
- DISorientation activity
- V2_Institute for Unstable Media
- Studio Spass
- Journal Review session and dinner at Hotel New York
Friday
- Kunstahl Rotterdam
- Het Nieuwe Instituut
- Museum Bojimans Van Beuningen
- Markethal Rotterdam
Friday was a very solid last day of our trip. Our hotel in Rotterdam had the most amazing breakfast cafe. Those Holland oats made my dreams come true!
Het Niewe Intituut was probably my favorite place we went on Friday. They had this awesome exhibit called The Life Fair, which was full of new body products. It is hard to explain, but it was basically like a fake marketplace, with commercial products that would help you achieve your ideal self. It was very interactive and makes you think a lot about the things you value and how technology, politics, ethics and design intersect and affect all of this. Some of the products they had there were self-marriage kits, lie detectors, palm-reading and even a make your own porn star virtual reality (I did not try this, after my last bad virtual reality experience but it got good reviews from my classmates).
Overall, I really had the best week in the Netherlands. I love that DIS gets students out of the classroom and even out of Denmark for their classes. I’m back and feeling even closer with my design friends and feeling more inspired and ready to tackle project #2 in the studio. Thank you to Jeanette and Kate for leading us on a great trip and thank you to anyone who read this crazy long post.
chlo-penhagen 
Love all your writing and awesome descriptions of the wonderful cities you get to visit. It is so much fun for me knowing you are loving every minute of your stay. Miss you, Grandma
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