Global Moorings: Days 110 - 113 (June 24 - 27, 2013): Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The Quick Facts:

* Another train ride, this time from Berlin to Amsterdam
* There’s a lot to see and do in Amsterdam, so we decided to devote four days to the city
* Highlights include the Rijks Museum (home to Rembrandt’s masterpiece the Night Watch, as well as other great works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others), the Van Gogh Museum, the moving Anne Frank House, the Red Light District, and endless bike riding opportunities
* Stayed at Gandalf Passenger Ship – yep, a boat! Very close to Centraal Station, a wonderful place to stay and not too expensive. It’s a converted boat so the rooms are small, but the people who own it are lovely (as is their sweet dog Jala (to quote Ron Burgundy, “that’s a soft j”)) and they make a delicious breakfast every morning.

The Good:

* The museums – Rembrandt and Van Gogh alone are special treats, not to mention all the other Dutch masters on display
* Anne Frank House – to actually see the space where they hid for over two years, and to re-hear her stories and selected journal entries, is a very powerful experience and well worth the time spent waiting on the line to get in
* Our Bike Tour – we went on a bike tour that took us to the countryside, a cheese farm, and yes a windmill!
* The culture – Amsterdam is very chilled out and famous for its tolerance of, well, just about anything. It’s a great city to just relax an afternoon away with a glass of beer and some chips.

The Bad:

* Nothing really, although the weather is atrocious – at the end of June the highs were only in upper 50s, and it rains 200 days per year there so get ready for that!

Four days in Amsterdam! Our hotel – I’m on a boat! (I got my swim trunks and my flippy-floppies….)

Amsterdam has a lot of museums to check out, most of which don’t allow photographs. The Rijks Museum, which houses Rembrandt and a lot of the other classical Dutch painters, bears a striking resemblance to the train station:

Rijks Museum

Train Station

The reason? Designed by the same guy at the same time. I hope they didn’t pay him twice for this lack of imagination!

By the Rijks Museum is the fairly famous IAmsterdam sign. Let’s play “Where’s Andy?” in the second and third photos below (third photo is if you can’t find me in the second):

Our bike ride took us on a tour of Amsterdam and the surrounding countryside, including a fascinating look at the lock system they’ve set up. Amsterdam is essentially below sea level, and a staggering proportion of its land (like 70%) is “reclaimed” land that has been dredged and damned. The Department of Water Management constantly monitors the water levels in Amsterdam and the rest of Holland to ensure against flooding, as the margin for error between dryness and flooding is quite small, like a few inches. Here is a newer lock protecting a houseboat community….

And here is an older lock that is only used as an escape valve should water levels get too high. Not sure if you can tell, but the difference in water levels between left and right in this photo is 5 meters!

We also stopped at a clog and cheese farm (super touristy but had to be done), where we saw some cows, cheese, and clogs!

These pair seemed to be too big for both me and Carrie…

And finally, our bike ride took us to a windmill! Classic Dutch, there used to be 10,000 windmills in the Netherlands, now there are only ~1,000 and they are all protected by the government. In their day, they were used to pump water out of areas to produce more land for people to live on. Today, they are houses for people to live in.

Here are some other pictures from our bike ride, and just walking around the vast canal system which are lined on either side by the classically arrow, tall Dutch houses with the gabled roofs.