Layover in Amsterdam: Two Days Amongst the Bikes, Boats and Dutch.

The first thing you notice about Amsterdam is the bicycles. Thousands of them. Literally. They are everywhere. Leaning up against racks and buildings, tipped over on sidewalks, many unlocked. People zipping down bike lanes on them, weaving on to sidewalks or out on to streets, around tourists and dodging cars. They clearly outnumber cars and seem to outnumber people. According to Rick Steves, there’s a parking garage by the central train station just for bicycles, a big one.

The next thing you notice are the boats. Large ones, small ones, docked ones. Commercial boats, row boats, motorboats, tour boats, houseboats. All navigating rings of canals. Narrow strips of water encircling the city center and forming interconnected channels for commerce, transportation, commuting, sightseeing and living.

Amsterdam was quickly climbing on our list of favorite places and best European cities.

Day One: Art on Display in Amsterdam. On our first full day, after trying to learn some Dutch from the waitresses at dinner the night before, we headed off to the Rjiksmuseum (“Rjiks” rhymes with “bikes”). We bought the audio-guide and did the “Best of” tour which was like a scavenger hunt and required the navigational abilities of a well-trained Dutch sailor to find the way to the rooms for each piece using the highlighted path on the device’s map. The Vermeer were still locked away for the special Vermeer exhibition which had ended the day prior, but we feasted on a full course of Rembrandt, enjoyed the common scenes of Jan Steen and prepared to immerse in Van Gogh with the first of several of the day’s self-portraits. Ending the highlights tour in the Asian art room, for which we wished we’d had more time, we were off to see more Van Gogh at our scheduled tour time.

When I had tried to book tickets to the Van Gogh Museum online a few weeks ago, they were all sold out for the days we’d be in Amsterdam, much like the Anne Frank House tickets when I tried to buy them six weeks ago (more on this later). This turned out to be a happy accident. We booked a Viator tour which brought us to Cecilia (who immediately assured us is not breaking anyone’s heart) from Babylon Tours an Italian dynamo of art enthusiasm, passion for Van Gogh and energy. She made our visit to the museum with her entertaining tidbits, funny quips, knowledge of Van Gogh’s art and ability to get us to appreciate it all in the context of Van Gogh’s troubled life, ups and downs, happy periods and stormy ones as we gazed upon his many works displayed here.

Van Gogh began his life forced to visit his namesake deceased infant brother’s gravesite with his mommy dearest, nearly daily. Rejected by his family, save for brother Theo, he was routinely discarded by those with whom he lived and places he worked. He was poor. So poor, he often used both sides of the canvas to paint (which you can see for yourself in the self-portrait gallery). His personal hygiene was sketchy at best, and his lack of dental diligence resulted in six lost teeth in one journey enroute to Paris. Perhaps cleanliness was at least one root cause of his lack of luck with the ladies (drunkenness likely another). Paint, smoke, drink, don’t wash, visit a prostitute, repeat. But… he was a masterful painter who reinvented himself and his style continuously. From his darker, earlier paintings influenced by Rembrandt during his time in Amsterdam and London, to his more colorful fields, trees and flowers for which he took influence from, and which helped influence friends Monet, Renoir and Gauguin to his tortured familiar spirals of Starry Night painted from his bedroom at the institution where he checked himself in following the slicing off and gifting of his ear to his favorite hooker. You can follow his trail of ups and downs and moods as you ascend the stairs of the museum. Fortunately, after all we saw and learned we concurred, Cecilia didn’t break our hearts. Her tour was fantastic.

Red Light District. After immersing in high culture, I struck out to see the low life. Rick Steves had me more worried than normal about pick pockets or a mugging, so I headed off sans camera for a quick loop through the red-light district. Pot shops, brothels, strip clubs and S&M shops surrounded by one-star hotels, Asian food restaurants, massage parlors and bars all packed full of (mostly) men on testosterone fueled quests for beer, dope and “culture”. Rick’s warnings were overblown, for me anyway, at 7pm though later I have no doubt they should be heeded. It’s like an amped up Bourbon Street with prostitutes more visibly, and legally, soliciting patrons from the posts of their windows along streets and alleyways.

Day Two: Touring by Land and Water. On our second full day, we headed to Amsterdam’s Central Station to follow the Rick Steves’ Amsterdam City Walk tour. Regular readers will know that we love a Rick Steves walking tour as a way to learn some quick history and gain an orientation to a city. He took us down Damrak, past the Stock Exchange, to Dam Square home of the former royal palace and World War II monument. Then over to Kalverstraat, a shopping district, where we ducked into a “hidden” Catholic church from the days when the Catholics couldn’t worship here without persecution (from 1578 to 1795), past the quirky looking (but temporarily moved at the time of our visit) Amsterdam Museum and into Het Begijnhof a small collection of private homes for women which were once the homes of Begijnen women. The Begijnen were pious, single Catholic women who preferred to live together, religiously and privately than to live in the convent and take vows. Leaving the Begijnhof homes, we visited the Mint clock tower as it rang noon and the Spui Square, where we returned later in the day for a snack. Rick’s tour passes through and then circles back and ends at Spui after passing through the flower market (which our boat operator later told us is pretty much a scam with most of the authentic flower vendors gone).

With most of our steps logged for the day, off we went to find the boat we’d booked for a 1pm canal cruise with “captain Jack”, referred to us by our hotel (Hotel Estherea). It was a bit difficult to locate, mostly because we arrived before Jack and his boat did, but some helpful sanitation workers helped us track him down. Jack told us his Dutch name is “too difficult to pronounce unless you’re drunk”, so he just goes by Jack for the tourists. I took hundreds of photos, mostly of bikes and people we passed by as we floated down canal after canal in a completely lost state but, fortunately, we didn’t need to navigate with Jack at the helm. He was a wealth of knowledge and anecdotes which, frankly, I mostly missed being focused on my photography. I do remember he said that the red lights of the red-light district were initially used to hide the syphilis and that Amstel River water is safe to drink and that Amstel beer used to source its water from it (though he smirked and went on to say “that’s why Heineken is more popular”). He proved the water’s cleanliness by dipping a glass in, which he said he used to drink for effect, but he passed on a sip and so did we. His boat was small, there were only five of us, including Jack, on board but that’s the way we like it. Small, intimate, local and entertaining.

Scenes from a boat tour

Where we Ate. If you read these pages to get our restaurant recommendations, here you go. We didn’t have a single bad meal. We had French with a Dutch twist for dinner at De Struisvogel, an intimate, small, shared-table place where I learned all the Dutch I quickly forgot. We had a more upscale Italian dinner at Bussia with a waiter from Rome and had tacos at La Condesa Taqueria. We ate breakfast two of three days at Broodjie Bert and had soup for lunch one day at Soup En Zo. We also tasted the locally made predecessor to gin, Janever, at A. van Wees Tasting bar, a total accident as we dropped in for a pre-taco cocktail. Check it out, but go mildly, it’s strong.

Saving one for next time. Regrettably, we missed the Anne Frank House tour, but frankly, we wouldn’t really have had the time to do it justice anyway with only two days and everything else we’d planned. I’d read that if you couldn’t score tickets when they go on sale six weeks before (9am Amsterdam time) that you should check back frequently because additional tickets are released for sale in the interim period. This didn’t appear to be true, at least in my experience. I checked back often, daily initially, after missing my window (still not sure how, since many other weeks I’ve looked at six weeks out did not sell out quite so fast). However, since this trip to Amsterdam was scheduled primarily to get a better airfare from Boston to Portugal, we viewed it as more of a scouting visit anyway.

So, we’ll be back, to catch the museums we missed and spend more time amongst the canals, bikes and lovely Dutch people and others who call this amazing European city home.