Amsterdam

Canal

Red Light District

Paris & big clogs

Summer, Van Gogh Museum

Dutch farmland, train from Brussels to Amsterdam

Anne Frank House

Stairs, Anne Frank House

Downtown Amsterdam

Tulips, etc.

Paris, exploring the streets of Amsterdam

Interesting canal bridge

VW hippie bus mural

Street mural

Pot cookies, etc.

Steve, Van Gogh Museum

Canal with swans, Red Light Disterict

Amsterdam is amazing, and predictably our favorite on this trip. As Justine says "I could live here".  We took a couple hour train from Brussels, seeing flat farmland thru haze. No tulips, but lots of greenhouses. The kids read their Kindles, a lifesaver. They have each read up to around 30 books, since Christmas.

Our impressions of Amsterdam are that is is a vibrant city, with lots of youth (relatively speaking), obviously quite liberal (more on that later!) with lots of sights and exhibitions. Great food, too. Everybody bicycles. All streets have designated bike lanes, you don't want to be walking in those. Not as many blue eyed blondes as one might expect. Immigration?

We either walked, or took the above ground tram, as the city is easily travelled. We continued on our gastronomic adventure, enjoying Mexican, Italian and Chinese. You could also buy  hot dogs and herring dogs (!) at street stands. I got some restaurant food poisoning , so I did not try a herring dog.

The "Coffee Shops" in Amsterdam are where one goes to smoke pot or hashish. They were omnipresent. There was minimal outdoor pot smoking. The pedestrians were well behaved, you might say even mellow. A variety of pot cookies, bongs, seeds and other accessories were in the little grocery or souvenir stores. I suppose the pastry stores would have a brisk business in this climate.

I ran into a mural of an old VW van, with a "no nukes" bumper sticker, which reminded me of the one I had in the 70's, with the same sticker (Flashback?). Interestingly, my dad drove us around Europe in one as well, in 1970.

There were many pedestrian streets, with great shopping. The kids bought their usual items, post cards, key chains, Amsterdam T-shirts (pre screened by their parents, as there are a lot of X-rated images). We found an American bookstore, where Justine and I stocked up on non digital books. The architecture is pleasant, many older, well kept buildings, often in pastels. Certainly the canals give the city an interesting visual flavor. There is a fair amount of boat activity, and the boats are long and narrow, making for wide turns into narrow passages. The canals were incorporated in the city in the 1600s, used for defense, as well as beer transport. Amsterdam has been called the "Venice of the North." Rembrandt lived by one of these canals, for a while.

We saw the Anne Frank house, which opened in 1960, and gets 1M tourists per year. It is a well designed exhibit, and the kids were moved by the photos and artifacts. Anne was their age when she and her family hid there for 2 years, only to be ratted out. She died in a concentration camp, from typhoid, a few months before the war was over. Her father (who died in 1980) survived in a separate camp, but the rest of the family did not. He helped start the museum, which houses her diary, the written wisdom is precocious. I recall climbing the narrow stairs there forty years ago.

We visited the Van Gogh Museum, which has the largest collection of Van Gogh paintings in the world. His paintings are so vivid and colorful. They compliment Amsterdam. There was also a Picasso exhibition, and a good variety of Monet, Manet, Gauguin and Cezanne.  Interestingly, Vincent bought a large Gauguin painting that was exhibited there, which he had hung in his own apartment. He even painted well when he was in the nut house. A tragedy to lose him at the age of thirty seven. Summer really appreciated the art, studiously observing the techniques and styles. What a great collection of expressions under 1 roof!

We missed going on a canal boat tour the day I was sick. That night, Paris and I wandered the streets and the canal by-ways of Amsterdam. We saw some cool canal bridges that could raise, then we followed some swans, as I was photographing them. I started to see some red reflections in the rippling water, which made for some good photos when mixed with the brilliant white swans. Then Paris found the reason for the red colors-we had wandered into in the Red Light District. She pressured me to finish my photos, so I hurriedly snapped away.

We had planned on going to the airport early AM via tram then train, but we discovered that the tram wasn't running yet, we hopped a cab towards the train station, then the driver said he would take us all the 18km to the airport for thirty euros (we had previously had quotes of 45-60), so we had a good deal, and we got there early, without hassle.

I agree with Justine, Amsterdam would be very livable. I would add that to my own favorites list of Barcelona and London. However, we are going to Italy next, so one might expect this list to expand!