Friday night I took cab in New York.

After a few minutes I heard someone: "hey! hey you! yeah, you in the backseat of that cab!"

It turned out to be a TV commercial on the small TV in front of me.

This is the last weekend of the exhibition Amsterdam/New Amsterdam -- the Worlds of Henry Hudson. A visit yesterday showed that this popular exhibition is drawing an interested audience even after 6 months of display.

This is a beautiful exhibition about Amsterdam and the first settlements in Manhattan and surroundings in what was called at the time New Netherland. The Museum of the City of New York has a wealth of original documents, artifacts and paintings on display that provide a glimpse of life in New Netherland and the Netherlands at that time.

Among the documents on display is the Treaty of Breda from 1667 from the National Library of the Netherlands. It is the formal end of the war between the English and the Dutch, and it was made under conditions of uti possidetis, "as you posses". This meant that New Amsterdam would stay in English hands and the Dutch would keep Suriname.

A painting by Jan van Goyen, The Hague from the North-East, was among the original paintings on loan from the Netherlands. Paintings of New Netherland from that time are not available, but recent historically accurate works by Len Tantillo such as Hanover Square, Manhattan give a good view of how the city looked like. The National Library of the Netherlands provided an original copy of A Description of New Netherland by Adriaen van der Donck.

Most of the knowledge we have from that time comes from written documents: "What we know about leisure activities and children's games in New Amsterdam comes from ordinances outlawing them on Sundays".

The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the New Netherland Project in Albany and Scheepvaartsmuseum in Amsterdam. The Scheepvaartsmuseum is the Dutch national Maritime Museum. Its building in Amsterdam is undergoing extensive renovations and the museum has been closed for a number of years.

For more information see also the reviewin the New York Times.

The Museum of the City of New York, Amsterdam/New Amsterdam: the Worlds of Henry Hudson
through September 27, 2009
http://www.mcny.org

Kids games.

A large 3D map of New Amsterdam.

The seal of the province of New Netherlands during years 1626-1654.

You know when you're at a Southern dentist if they ask you:

"Do you smoke? Drink coffee? Drink sweetened tea?"

The celebrations of the Hudson 400 year are not limited to this side of the Atlantic -- there are also many events and museum exhibitions in the Netherlands. One of the highlights is an exhibition in the Westfries Museum in Hoorn, Hollanders aan de Hudson, of works of Len Tantillo.

Mr. Tantillo (Poughkeepsie, 1947) is an artist and historian with a passion for the Hudson River region. An architect by training, he has recreated many historical views of New York, Albany and other places through beautiful paintings and drawings. The Westfries Museum has nearly 60 of his works on display in the exhibition about 'the Dutch at the Hudson'.

The Westfries Museum is a museum for regional history in Hoorn, a city with an extensive history. Hoorn was one of the cities that operated the Dutch East India Company ("VOC"), the trading company that commissioned Henry Hudson to find an easterly passage to Asia. The museum has an extensive collection paintings and objects, including many of the VOC.

The exhibition opened September 5th with Mr. Tantillo and his wife Corliss in attendance. The American Consular General to the Netherlands, Julie Ruterbories, was representing the American Embassy (the new American Ambassador Hartor Levin was in New York to attend the Americans and Dutch will appreciate Manhattan, 1660, a gorgeous reproduction of the 'skyline' of Manhattan 350 years ago. It's interesting to compare this work with the drawing by Johannes Vingboons, made in 1656 with the view of the island Manhattan from the sea which is currently on display in the South Point museum.

West Fries Museum, Holland aan de Hudson
http://www.wfm.nl
through November 29, 2009

The Internal Revenue Service today announced a one-time extension of the deadline for special voluntary disclosures by taxpayers with unreported income from hidden offshore (foreign) accounts. These taxpayers now have until Oct. 15, 2009.

This is important for those with bank accounts in the Netherlands or elsewhere. US law states that all US persons (citizens, green card holders, visa holders) must pay tax on their worldwide income. In addition to reporting the interest income earned to the IRS, tax payers are required to file form TD F 90-22.1 if the total balance of foreign accounts exceeds $10,000 at any time during the year. In many cases there is tax credit for tax paid on earned interest in a foreign country.

According to the WSJ today: 'most of those accepted into the IRS's disclosure program will owe back taxes, interest and a special penalty that will work out to 40% to 60% of the account balance, plus legal and accounting fees, attorneys say. But the agency has said it is unlikely to bring criminal charges against anyone who steps forward'.

Form TD F 90-22.1:

"Who needs to file? Each United States person who has a financial interest in or signature or other authority over any foreign financial accounts, including bank, securities, or other types of financial accounts, in a foreign country, if the aggregate value of these financial accounts exceeds $10,000 at any time during the calendar year, must report that relationship each calendar year by filing this report with the Department of the Treasury on or before June 30, of the succeeding year."

You know how you can feel guilty about not having read certain books?

Well, I've always felt guilty that there are certain books from high school I never got a chance to read. The last couple of weeks I've done some 'catching up' and I read a couple of the most popular high school books I'd not read yet.

• Slaughterhouse-Five -- rambling, not interesting, boring
• Brave New World -- nice science fiction. Author was ahead of its time by 70 years, very relevant.
• To Kill a Mockingbird -- lovely, Southern
• The Catcher in the Rye -- very depressing

So two were nice (I really enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird) and two weren't very good. In the mean time I'm working on a new project that I'm enjoying very much; more on that later.

This Sunday Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende will visit the Brooklyn Museum, joined by Minister of Foreign Affairs Verhagen and Minister for Development Cooperation Koenders.

As we wrote before, the Brooklyn museum is hosting various special events this year around the Schenck Houses, two early Dutch colonial houses. The wooden houses suggest the way a Dutch American family might have lived in Brooklyn over a period of 150 years. They were moved to the Brooklyn museum in 1929 and 1964, and after a renovation in 2007 they are standing next to each other on the fourth floor of the museum.

Breuckelen, as its first name was, was named for Breukelen in the province of Utrecht in the Netherlands when it was authorized by the Dutch West India Company in 1646. Brooklyn's official motto is still in old-Dutch: Eendraght Maeckt Maght. Obviously a source of pride for the 'original Brooklyn' in Utrecht, there is a special website to celebrate the Brooklyn Connection, part of BrooklynBridgeBreukelen.

The American edition of Four Centuries of Dutch-American Relations, 1609-2009 will be officially launched in Washington, DC this Friday.

The book examines the ties between the Netherlands and the United States. That this is a long and extensive relationship is shown by the size of the book. It is written by nearly one hundred Dutch and American scholars and with almost 1,000 pages it weighs more than 5 pounds.

The Wilson Center, in in cooperation with the Netherland-America Foundation, Roosevelt Study Center, and the Embassy of the Netherlands, will host the official presentation and a discussion of U.S.-Dutch relations this Friday; over the next weeks there will be several other presentations of the book in the US and in the Netherlands.

In attendance in Washington DC will be Renée Jones-Bos, Ambassador of the Netherlands to the United States, L. Paul Bremer III, former U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands and Ernst H. van der Beugel, Professor of Diplomatic History of Atlantic Cooperation at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. The editors of the book will be in attendance also: Cornelis A. van Minnen, Director of the Roosevelt Study Center and Professor of American History at Ghent University, Belgium, Hans Krabbendam, Assistant Director of the Roosevelt Study Center and Giles Scott-Smith, Senior Researcher at the Roosevelt Study Center.

The book is now available on Amazon for $39.95 for a hardcover edition. It is published by Boom in Amsterdam (ISBN 9789085066538) and State University of New York Press in Albany, New York (ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3013-3).

With the NY400 week now officially over and Crown Prince Willem Alexander and Princess Maxima back in The Hague today to open the parliamentary year, there are still plenty of events in the New York area.

In addition to the art exhibitions we wrote about earlier there are a number of other museums that pay special attention to the celebration of Dutch American ties.

Here's a list with 10 museum exhibitions throughout the next few months:

• Through September 27: Mannahatta Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City (Museum of the City of New York)
• Through September 27: the Worlds of Henry Hudson (also in the Museum of the City of New York)
• Through September 27: Dutch Treats: Highlights from the collection of George Way (Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden)
• Through October 17: Actien Handel: Early Dutch Finance and the Founding of America (Museum of American Finance)
• Through November 10: The Half Moon (Halve Maen) replica will be available for tours. See the website for its schedule.
• Through December 31: When Brooklyn was Breukelen: A Celebration of the Schenck Houses (Brooklyn Museum)
• Through December 31: Dutch Culinary Traditions in America (Mount Vernon Hotel Museum & Garden)
• Through January 10, 2010: Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture (Hudson River Museum)
• Through March 7, 2010: 1609 (New York State Museum, Albany)
• Through July 26, 2010: Double Dutch – 400 years after Henry Hudson discovering new frontiers in contemporary Dutch art (The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art)

So, there is plenty to do this fall in the NY area for those interested in Dutch American history and culture.

We ate boerenkool for dinner. It was sunny today but it is getting dark earlier these days, so I figured it was okay to make a traditional winter dish. The boerenkool, as always, was delicious and we did our duty in researching a rookworst substitute -- more on that later. We even had my favorite Zaanse mustard. Now if only we had gele vla it would have been a fully Dutch dinner.

Yesterday over dinner we watched some Dutch TV online. That was fun as always, with Prince Willem-Alexander and Princess Maxima on orange bikes in New York. We didn't get to see the weather report though.