This is my first visit to Amsterdam and we arrived by train from Brussels. Oh, the bicycles! Exiting the train station, I was immediately struck first by the 3-level parking garage for bikes and then the people on bicycles everywhere! You see more bikes than cars and they go whizzing along seeming as if they will never stop for anyone, but they do. People ride close together and zig and zag in and out of any wayward pedestrians. They will stop for a true red light, of which there are few, but if you are crossing an intersection, you better beware and either move quickly or wait. Bike lanes exist next to sidewalks or else they share the road with the few cars and motor scooters. Biks are locked in place along the bridge railings and there are usually one or two bikes parked outside every building. Most have baskets or paniers and people do their grocery shopping and other errands on their bikes and bike to work. It makes for a very quiet city.
After the bikes, there are the canals. They are lovely and quiet; moored alongside you will see houseboats and rowboats and cruising almost stealthily down the middle are the tour boats–long and sleek and slightly rounded on top, designed to slide comfortably under the arched bridges. The canals are arranged in rings out from the older section of the city and with all the many bridges linking the city from one canal to the other, it is easy to get turned around and perhaps even lost. Our hotel staff advised us to always count the bridges we crossed. But, even so, you can walk on the wrong or a different side of a particular canal and get confused that way.
Amsterdam is also a city of museums we discovered. There seems to be a museum for every subject or object. Examples include the Cheese Museum (really a cheese shop with some history about cheese making), a diamond museum, the Sex Museum, the Electric Lady (a museum of fluorescent art), and the Amsterdam Tulip Museum. The latter is a small museum in tight quarters, but they provide an informative look at the history of tulips in the New World and the tulip industry. The front of the museum is a shop, the first thing you come to, and they sell tulip and amaryllis bulbs as well as all sorts of tulip memorabilia.
Midst this surfeit of museums, we visited the Rijks Museum which is a grand and glorious art museum including an depth focus on Rembrandt. And just across the way from the Rijks, we also toured the Van Gogh Museum. In both cases, these were popular sites and, even though we arrived moments after opening, they both filled up quickly with lots of visitors. The galleries are smaller in the Van Gogh Museum and so the crowds sometimes made it difficult to get close enough to see the smaller works or to read the labels. Fortunately, both museums have English on their labels and signs as well as Dutch.
On our last day, we walked from the center of town all the way out to the National Resistance Museum which is across the street from the zoo and near the botanical garden. It was well worth the trek. This museum provides a detailed picture of life in the Netherlands from 1940-45 under German occupation. It was a brutal, painful and uncertain time. While Jews were specifically targeted for mistreatment, deportation or death, all citizens suffered food and fuel shortages, constraints on their movements, and an overall lack of control over their lives. Our next stop is Berlin and this museum experience adds another facet to how we will approach it.
Hotel Sebastian’s where we stayed was wonderfully helpful with restaurant recommendations for dinner and we ran the gamut from fish (Lucius) to Indonesian (Kantjil & de Tijger) to tapas to elegant continental. At Belhamel, an old house overlooking the canal, we not only enjoyed our meal, but made friends with the couples on either side of us. The middle-aged couple to our right were from Manhattan and so we traded notes about New York and staying in Amsterdam. Later an older couple were neighbors on our left. They live in Shewood Forest in the UK and had come over on the ferry to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. They were lovely and he regaled us with his Trip Advisor statistics and all the various cities and countries he had visited and spent time in in his corporate life (including New Jersey!). We shared how long we’ve been married and then when a new couple arrived on the right–younger and residents of Amsterdam, we learned they were celebrating 13 years. We didn’t find out how long couple #1 had been married, perhaps they weren’t.
