I’m sitting in Amsterdam Centraal waiting for a train to Paris. I’m not taking it all of the way to Paris. I’m only going as far as Brussels. There, I’ll hop on another train to London. It will be my first trip to an English-speaking country in four weeks. Woohoo!!!
Hmmm . . . Amsterdam . . . where to start. I didn’t do nearly as much sightseeing in Amsterdam as I did in other cities where I stayed at least four nights. I spent much more time in Amsterdam . . . relaxing . . . and walking around town in a relaxed state of mind. Knowing that likely would be the case, I did go to all of the places in Amsterdam that I wanted to hit, and went to a few more that I didn’t even know existed before I got there.
I guess that I’ll dedicate this post to the places that were on my original agenda that I visited while in Amsterdam. The top place on my to do list was the Anne Frank Huis. Like everybody else, I read the book a few times as a child and have always been intrigued. Of all the places I’ve visited, the Anne Frank house had the longest line that I’ve been in since I went to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Once inside (it’s a little pricey), we got the tour of the digs. All of the information was in English as well as Dutch, so it was easy to follow. There wasn’t much to it since there’s no furniture, just the rooms of the secret annex, but the one thing that I took away was how small all of the rooms in the secret annex were. I think claustrophobia would have got to me before the Nazis did.
The next place on my list was the Heineken Brewery. Now, I don’t think it’s an actual brewery anymore, so it’s more of a brewery museum. It was quite interesting as it allowed me to learn more about beer, although to be honest, Heineken is far from my favorite beer. At the end, though, we got free beer at the Heineken bar, so I guess you can’t argue with that. Like all of the other sights in Amsterdam, though, it was kind of expensive. Fifteen euro (about twenty-two dollars).
I also wanted to make sure that I went to the Van Gogh museum. Unlike other museums I had been to in Europe, e.g., British Museum, the Louvre, the people here took the “no photographs” rule pretty seriously, so I don’t have anything from inside. If you’re a Van Gogh fan, the place is very interesting. In addition to paintings, the museum also focuses on correspondence Van Gogh had with his brother and others, e.g., Guagin. These letters are in Dutch, but several are translated into English and many also contain sketches of paintings Van Gogh had finished or just begun or never actually painted. Extremely interesting look at an extremely interested man.
The final “must see” on my list was the Dutch History Museum because, well I’ve looked at the local history museum in almost every city I visited, so it just felt right. Although I did learn a lot about the history of Amsterdam (and got ideas about additional places to visit), beyond that, there was little to get excited about. Much of the museum attempted to demonstrate Amsterdam history through art, fittingly enough. The most famous museum in Amsterdam likely is the Rijksmuseum, but having seen enough Dutch Master paintings everywhere else in Europe, and not being the biggest fan in the world, I decided to bypass that particular one.
That’s enough for this post. I’ll probably talk about the places I visited that weren’t on my “must see” list in the next post.
Dag.
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