Amsterday – Great Dam City
As I thought about the today’s blog on Amsterdam, I considered starting with “It was a dark and stormy night….” On reflection, it was still the afternoon. More on the weather later; let me tell you about Amsterdam first.
Amsterdam is a wonderful city that’s got a great deal to offer visitors and is very easy to get around. We arrived from Munich on and Inter-City Express (ICE) train – the trains travel at speeds up to 180 mph and have fewer stops. The trains are more comfortable than flying by a wide margin, and most stations (including Amsterdam) are located close to downtown making it easier than navigating through airports. Consider this – the Munich’s airport is a $90 taxi ride from downtown. The Munich train station was a 3-minute walk from our hotel. In Amsterdam, our hotel was a 10-minute ferry ride (free) from the train station.
Freedoms and Tolerance
A city that prides itself on freedoms and tolerance, Amsterdam gave us some interesting experiences early on. For example, directions to pick up museum tickets included ‘… and we’re just past the Sex Museum on the same side of the street…” That, my friends, was in the nice part of the city. Some of the nicest hotels are in the same neighborhood as the Hash Marijuana and Hemp Museum and only blocks from the Museum of Prostitution. These are nice, respectable neighborhoods. They’re not lying when they say that they’re tolerant.
Walking Tour
After walking around on our own for the morning, we took a three-hour walking tour of Amsterdam with Free Dam Tours (freedamtours.com). It was great! Our guide was Charlotte, whose English was excellent and her passion for the city was evident. We got great historical insight around the origin of the name (dam on the river Amstel) and how prostitution came to be tolerated there. Oh, and yes, she took us through the red-light district – the tales are true. Unless I saw it myself I wouldn’t have believed it, but the Salvation Army has offices right next to an ‘establishment’ and across a canal from the Museum of Prostitution.
Rather than dwelling on that portion of the tour, I’ll mention that we also saw other cultural and historical portions of the city. Charlotte’s explanations of the expansion of the city over time and the role of the East India Trading Company in making the Netherlands a world power were interesting. As she talked we walked past historical buildings and monuments. It was awesome. She also spoke of the hardships of WWII while we walked through the Jewish quarter.
Anne Frank
After the walking tour, Julie and I hiked past the palace and across several canal bridges to the Anne Frank house. The original house remains, but there is a much larger and more modern museum just around the corner. If you want to visit, plan ahead. At times the wait list to see the house is over a month long. The house itself looks like any of the hundreds of other homes we saw. However, looking at it I had a flashback to reading the Diary of Anne Frank in school. It’s almost spooky how close the home’s appearance matches the memory my mind’s eye created. Even without going inside, I recommend stopping and seeing the building for yourself.
Thursday – Different Weather
Having been traveling across Europe for nearly two months, I have to say that we had great weather. Today turned out to be different. We headed out after breakfast and jumped on the ferry to the train station downtown. The sky was overcast and the wind was cool. Julie and I both wore our light rain jackets because of the wind and the chill. We had our list of activities for the day, so first, we headed off to visit the NEMO Science Museum.
NEMO
NEMO is an interactive science museum that is focused on kids, but we had a great time there as well. They structure activities for kids and make it fun to learn. For example, learning about the importance of water and how water is purified for drinking. The exhibit has kids pumping water into buckets and moving it through stages of purification. And next to that you have to build dikes out of plastic blocks as water flows down the ‘river’. Being Amsterdam, there was a section dedicated to teenager development, puberty, and teen ‘relationships’. After a quick walk inside and a peek at some of the exhibits, we fled to another floor.
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The Weather
While we were in the Maritime Museum, the clouds had dropped, winds picked up and there was a misty rain falling. We had about a mile and a quarter walk to the Centraal Station Ferry Terminal. Not so far that we needed a taxi, and the misty rain was not so bad, so off we went. As we walked, the clouds dropped further, the wind picked up and the mist became a bit denser.
The misty rain muted sound of the ever-present bicycles, leaving only the soft hiss of the tires on the wet pavement. Even the bells on the trams seemed softer. We made it to the ferry terminal, but the mist saturated any clothing not covered by our rain jackets. On the ferry ride, I was struck by how the weather seemed to drain all the color from the city. It was like riding through a blurred impressionistic painting of Amsterdam. Yesterday’s brightly colored buildings all merged into the muted landscape of misty colors and gray horizons. Even the brightly painted red channel markers appeared drab as they bobbed in the light chop as the ferry slipped by.
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Regardless of the weather, we had a good day. Back at the hotel we changed into dry clothing and elected to have dinner in the hotel. After all, now it was “a dark and stormy night…”.
More Amsterdam photos here.