Netherlands: Laid-back Amsterdam

 

I believe I was born to live on a houseboat in Amsterdam and own an old Citroen. 
Someone else is living my life!

The last stop on our spring 2025 trip to Europe was a city neither Jane nor I had ever visited: Amsterdam. We arrived on Sunday, June 8, after a one-hour train ride from Rotterdam.  We stayed four nights at  The Hendricks, a small harborfront hotel, giving us three full days to explore this unusual city of almost a million people. 

Amsterdam often is on lists with Venice, Barcelona and other European cities where overtourism has become a problem for fulltime residents and other tourists as well. The only seriously dense crowds we encountered here were that first Sunday afternoon as we were swept along through the heart of the tourist district. Even this part of town was bearable on other days and the streets just a block or two away seemed relatively unaffected. 

I had expected Amsterdam to be more like Venice, where all the traffic of daily life is carried on the water.  There are no cars or trucks. But every building in Amsterdam has a street (and sometimes a canal, too) in front of it and can be reached by car. The canals seem to be used only by houseboats tied up along the banks and by sightseeing boats. 

Here we had two things to see.  Ann Frank House and the Rijks Museum. Other than that, we mostly wandered around, took a 90-minute canal boat tour and enjoyed the relaxed ambiance. The pilot on our Those Dam Boat Guys tour made a point of saying that it was OK to smoke "whatever you want" as long as it didn't bother the other passengers. No one lit up, and I think the pilot was a bit disappointed. He explained that Amsterdam has been a live-and-let-live city for centuries, offering refuge to groups scorned in other parts of Europe. Indeed, Ann Frank's family moved to Amsterdam after fleeing the rise of Hitler in their native Germany. 

The interior of the Ann Frank House appears today much as it did during World War II. Her story, being captured as the war was nearing its end and then dying along with her sister of typhoid in a concentration camp, is well presented and understandable even if one has not read the famous diary. The museum does not allow photography, so though I have no photos here, you can see much of the house on the museum's web site (link above). 

The Rijks Museum is a huge place with corridors and corridors of Old Masters along with some 19th century works by Van Gogh. It would seem a shame to visit Amsterdam and not see one of the world's best art collections, but many of the works are so well known that seeing them in person doesn't add a lot. 

One thing I had been looking forward to in Amsterdam was dining at a rijsttafel, a Dutch restaurant offering small plates of Indonesian food. The Dutch colonized much of Indonesia in the 1700s and imported its cuisine.  Max may be an excellent rijsttafel (it means rice table) but it somehow wasn't the exceptional meal I had expected. Two other dinners were at the same Chinese restaurant, Oriental City, where we found Peking duck that we both thought better than that in New York City's Chinatown (and that's a high bar). It may seem odd to seek out Asian food in the Netherlands, but Dutch cuisine is pretty nondescript. We did try bitterballen, which are like crusty meatballs with beef stew inside. "It's interesting" is the polite response to "did you like it?" 

Then it was time to go. We flew nonstop to San Diego on KLM on Thursday, June 12, leaving at 11:10am and arriving home at noon on the same day. 

Here are some photos:

Bicycles park where they can all over Amsterdam.

We toured the canals on a much smaller boat. Ones
 like this are more typical.

The canals are home to more-or-less permanently moored houseboats. We were told they are
often moved only when their keels need to be repaired or repainted.

We arrived at this huge train station from Rotterdam
to start our visit here. This was taken from LuminAir,
the rooftop bar at the Amsterdam Doubletree hotel. 

The Rijks Museum is housed in this sprawling 1885  building..

Galleries combine paintings with other historic objects.

Johannes Vermeer's "The Milkmaid" (c.1660) is among the Rijks Museum's
most treasured holdings. 

The model of the Dutch warship William Rex was made in 1698
at the same shipyards where real warships were built. It's
at the Rijks Museum.

The model is one-twelveth the size of the real thing. It has 74 guns, and you
can see five of them here moved into position to fire. 

I asked the pilot of our canal boat tour why so many buildings
in Amsterdam appeard to tilt. He said they were all 
perfectly straight and perhaps I had been drinking.

I think some of the buildings look a little drunk.

An angel watches over Amsterdam from high
atop a canalside building.

Some of the streets of Amsterdam are as interesting as the canals.

This is the so-called Tower of Tears, part of a 
defensive wall built in the 1400s. It was from
this tower in 1609 that Henry Hudson departed
in his ship De Halfe Maen (The Half Moon) to
go to the New World where he laid the foundation
for Dutch colonization of what is now New York. 

We were told that a crazy artist lives in this building.

This tree is in front of the artist's building.

Another decorated tree on another canal.

Warm sunny days are not terribly common in Amsterdam,
so when one occurs people try to enjoy it.

Bitterballen are like deep-fried breaded spheres of
beef stew. They're a staple of Dutch bar menus.