Goodness gracious is this one late, but I didn’t want to leave the summer unfinished, so we’re at least going to burn through Amsterdam and the final week of my program in Stockholm to tie up the loose ends of this little bloggy endeavor. We’ll see how much of Amsterdam I actually remember at this point!
The photo up top was my first view of the city after taking the subway out of the airport. At first, I was a little surprised by how much of the subway system was above-ground, since that’s not really what I think of for a subway, but upon spending 10 seconds thinking about the fact that it was Amsterdam, I switched to being surprised that there was any actually subterranean subway at all. Truly, Amsterdam is an impressive feat of hydraulic engineering.
…well, that’s what I thought when I arrived, anyway. More on that one later.
(foreshadowing #1)
Anyway, I got into the city, checked into my hotel to drop off my bag, and then promptly set off to my first tourist site: the Our Lord in the Attic museum. This one was…maybe not worth the effort of getting around it on a still-sprained ankle, since all the stairwells were exactly this narrow, steep, and generally evil, and they took my walking stick away from me at the door to boot for fear of it…hurting the floors or something, I guess? Unclear. They did replace it with a weird little folding stool thingy, to their limited credit—I probably would just have left otherwise—but that wasn’t actually very useful as a support while walking, even if it was nice to have a little seat when I wanted to stay in one place to listen to part of the audio guide for awhile.
The main aesthetic event of the whole place was this chapel, made up of the upper three levels of this house with the floors knocked out to accommodate a high ceiling and balconies. The rest of the museum was little semi-furnished rooms and an accompanying audio tour of the history of catholicism in Amsterdam. Kind of interesting, and it did give me some kind of context for Amsterdam’s history in general going into my non-catholicism-centered historic bicycle tour later that day, but I don’t know that I’d recommend the museum to others who weren’t especially interested in the history of christian religious conflict in Amsterdam. Your time would probably be more interestingly spent on an extra hour and a half in the Rijksmuseum.
After the slightly-underwhelming attic museum, I scampered over a few streets to the bicycle shop where my three-hour bicycle tour was scheduled to begin.
Yes, I signed up for three hours of bicycling knowing that I had a sprained ankle. No, despite what you might think, I don’t regret that decision.
Since the motion of pedalling is all sort of confined to one single rotational plane without any side-to-side tilting, it wasn’t actually especially aggravating to an ankle sprain compared to just walking, and I was able to move much farther and see way more of the city by bike than I would have been able to with my rather limited walking abilities. Plus, it was a nice intro to Amsterdam’s history beyond just the experiences of its Catholic population, which was good context to know moving into all my other museum visits.
AND I got to meet this very friendly orange cat in the courtyard of a former nunnery-turned-social-housing building, so the whole thing was really worth it just for that.
Near the end of the tour, we took a break in the Vondelpark, where I tried out the park café’s apple pie at the combined recommendations of my tour guide and the cashier. As you can see, it was a very different sort of pastry than what you’d typically see labelled ‘apple pie’ in the US, which surprised me, but I enjoyed it nonetheless! Having tried both, I think I still prefer flaky-crusted to cakey-crusted apple pie, but that’s definitely in good part because of my personal apple-pie nostalgia, so I’m decidedly biased.
After that snack break, we returned to the bicycle shop past one particularly notable sight: Amsterdam’s narrowest house, the tiny little red one in the picture below. Apparently, Amsterdam building taxation used to be based on the width of the plot your house was built on, hence why all the historic buildings in Amsterdam trend towards being deep, tall, and narrow, with tiny windy staircases to allow for maximum floor space. That last point is also why they almost all have a little beam protruding from the middle of the facade located just below or at the edge of the roof: the stairs are too small to get large furniture up readily, so you’ve got to haul it up the outside with a pulley and send it in the window if you want a couch anywhere except the first floor!
After the bike tour, I got some dinner and headed back to my hotel a little on the later side, where the foreshadowing of future excitement continued in the form of an exciting discovery around 8 or 9 at night when I got back from dinner that the room they’d given me was entirely devoid of soap. No hand soap, no body wash or shampoo in the shower, nothing. That was a little odd, but I figured housekeeping might have just forgotten to restock the little bottles or whatever, so I went down to the front desk to ask for some soap.
Interestingly, the solution to no-soap-room was not to give me soap, but to move me to an entirely different room in a different building across the hotel campus. I had questions, but the new room was supplied with soap, and since I’d spent about a sum total of 5 minutes in the previous room without ever getting around to opening my bag, it was easy enough to make the switch.
(foreshadowing #2)
The next morning, I got up early and headed out to the Van Gogh Museum, which was quite nice; top highlights are compiled below because I’m starting to worry I’ll run out of the number of images WordPress will let me use on this website.
Now, after running into the Paris pride parade by accident two weeks earlier and not being able to properly stay and enjoy it on account of pre-scheduled dinner reservations, I’d made a point of checking on Amsterdam’s pride schedule for this weekend. Slightly unfortunately, my trip ended up being on the first rather than the second and last weekend of festivities, so I was missing the famous canal parade, but there was still a much smaller on-foot march and an opening celebration in the Vondelpark on Saturday that I was able to schedule myself proper time for among all my other Amsterdam shenanigans!
For awhile, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to find the march at all. The explanation of where it was supposed to go/when it began and ended was slightly confusing and also in Dutch, and I was trying to at least minimise how much I walked around on a sprained ankle, which limited my ability to go searching for it. Thankfully, I finally found a convenient bench at the edge of a square where I thought the march was supposed to pass to sit and wait for it, and after about a half an hour of sipping a smoothie and slowly losing hope that I’d parsed the route explanation correctly, they finally arrived!
After the march had gone on their way, I detoured through an open-air market on my way to Vondelpark for a fresh stroopwafel and some nice fruit to take with me.
Luckily, it was much easier to find the main stage in Vondelpark than to locate the march! Also, Amsterdam apparently gets excellent raspberries in late July. See, you’re learning important things from this blog! Well-spent time right here. You’re welcome.
This picture is very similar to the last one, but if you look just at the top of the crowd where they meet the trees near the edge of the stage, you’ll see one of my favorite parts of the Vondelpark celebration: a six-person brass band in matching rainbow uniforms riding a six-person tandem bicycle in loops around the park playing music. I’m delighted by the whimsy, and I think more small-to-midsize music groups should travel by tandem bicycle. For the vibes.
Lest you think I was ignoring them for my raspberries and the bicycling brass band, both of the performers whose sets I caught before I had to leave were good, too! 🙂
My final stop of the day was the Amsterdam Dungeon, an absolute tourist trap of an interactive theater attraction based on the ~dark history of Amsterdam~. Unsurprisingly, it was more than a bit silly, but they’d done a very nice job with their sets through the whole place. This picture was just the waiting room, since after that point they asked us not to take photos, but it got even better further in.
I also appreciated some of the actors’ willingness to improvise bits with visitors that couldn’t have been part of the usual script—I didn’t really mean to do it going in, but if you drop a larper into a nice set with a bunch of wacky characters to talk to, you can’t expect them not to start halfway improvising a character by the end….those’re the rules, I don’t make them.
This was also where I ended up with a slightly-overpriced but delightfully round little raven friend as a souvenir of my trip. How can you resist an orbular bird?
That evening, I headed back to the hotel after dinner and went to bed a little early, in order to be able to be up in time to grab breakfast and make it to my morning Rijksmuseum tour in good time. Luckily, there were no further soap-related issues that night.
(foreshadowing #3)
The next morning, I woke up to my phone alarm as usual, reached over the edge of the bed to turn my phone off where it was charging on the floor, and found myself reaching into a shallow lake to retrieve a formerly-submerged and dripping-wet, yet miraculously still-functional phone.
My first reaction was a moment of “oh god I failed at turning the shower off last night and flooded my hotel room” horror, but when I hiked up my pajama pants to go check the bathroom, none of the taps were on. So, I peeked out into the hallway to discover that yes, there was in fact a shallow river running down the hall, and no hotel staff in sight.
Luckily, the only things that had been on the floor were my phone and my shoes, so while my poor sandals still aren’t the same, the vast majority of my belongings were unscathed. I’d just started putting things back into my bag in preparation to head over to the front desk and ask for a transfer, when a frazzled member of the hotel staff came banging on my door to tell me to get out now because the water was getting hotter. I could, in fact, feel the formerly-cool water growing much warmer near the door even before I opened it, so I stuffed the last few things into my duffel bag and skittered barefoot in my pajamas across the hotel campus over to the main building with the front desk as quickly as possible.
I wasn’t able to find out much beyond that the problem was apparently an impressively catastrophic broken pipe, but over the course of the next hour and a half of waiting around, they kindly let me into a bathroom to get cleaned up a bit/put on real clothes, and comped my breakfast from the hotel buffet. I’m pretty sure my breakfast would have been free anyway with my room if I’d wanted to eat breakfast there, but it’s the thought that counts, I guess.
Eventually I just had to leave my bag and sad soggy sandals in the repurposed conference room that had seemingly become the storage ground for displaced guests’ baggage and hurry off into the city if I wanted to be able to do the Body Museum and still make my Rijksmuseum tour, but the whole incident made an inauspicious start to the day.
There are no pictures from the Body Museum, because it was kind of a disappointment. To be perfectly fair, their intended audience is definitely ‘slightly interested laypeople’, not ‘biologists fresh out of a class on comparative physiology’, but still, across 5 floors of museum I could have fit the notable things I didn’t already know on a single post-it note. So, good on Prof. Ahn for teaching an excellent physio class, but for me, rather a waste of a good $25 I could have spent on nice snacks instead.
My next stop turned out—probably not surprisingly—to be the highlight of my day. The Rijksmuseum was very cool, and if I’d been in better condition to walk and stand for hours at a time, it would have been even better. They had a beautiful library, some impressively detailed model ships about the size of a small elephant, and a gorgeous collection of historical clothing down in the basement.
Honestly, while it sounds silly, one of the highlights for me was just the way their map worked. It was all one big long piece of paper as usual, but folded up like an accordion into a booklet with a page for each level of the museum, and each page was a different length for nice color-coded easy access to each one. That sounds like a weird thing to love about a museum, but after the last two months of visiting European museums who all seemed to be bent on creating the least convenient possible maps that all have to flop open into a giant unwieldy length of paper to be read? The Rijksmuseum map was kind of revolutionary. Louvre, get good.
…I swear, whoever designed the Louvre map actively disliked all the tourists who were going to use it.
Unfortunately, by this point in the weekend of walking all around Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum tour’s unbroken period of walking and standing was the last straw for my ankle. The Rijksmuseum once again came through for me in weirdly specific ways with café staff who were very nice about giving me some ice in a tea-towel, though, so after resting for awhile and enjoying a nice glass of limeade, I was ready to move on to my last big event of Amsterdam: a canal tour.
The tour was pretty, and it was fun to see the city from the water instead of from street level! Two interesting architectural highlights:
A house under construction whose facade was protected as a historical building and as such couldn’t be taken down, even though the entire rest of the building behind it had been gutted. That blue you see through the windows there is the sky—there’s nothing behind it!
A nice snapshot of the leaning houses of Amsterdam. While the houses leaning forward are usually deliberate—though accounts vary as to what the architectural reasoning is—the left, right, and backward tilts are all just a result of foundations shifting because this whole place is built on pilings in a swamp!
After some other more comprehensive historical tours of the city, I didn’t learn much of note, but it was still very pretty. Given that the promised snacks and drinks didn’t actually include glühwein, hot cocoa, or an array of Dutch cheeses, I felt a little let down on that front. If I were to do it again, I’d book the much cheaper canal tour without free nibbles, and then take that money to a nice café where I could get a better array of local food to try.
Even with the snack disappointment, though, you can’t argue with these views!
Luckily, the curse had worn off by the time I had to travel the next day, and I made it back to Stockholm without incident! To close Amsterdam off and as a small preview of what was to become a theme in my life just two weeks later, behold: the Stockholm-Arlanda International Airport’s Moomin shop.
They’re watching you…
Lyra Cromwell 