Rita, our Uniworld host in Amsterdam, had scheduled a guided tour of the Rijksmuseum for 9:00 AM this morning. (3:00 AM by Tampa time!) Unfortunately, we overslept and missed the guided tour. Nevertheless, we decided to go there on our own. The Rijksmuseum (pronounced Rikes Museum) is one of the major attractions of Amsterdam. Rita had left tickets for us. We had a map of the city. It was supposed to be an easy half hour's walk from the hotel. What could possibly go wrong?
Just that I couldn't make any correlation between what I saw on the map and what I saw in front of me. We knew the general direction to the Rijksmuseum, so we started out in that direction, essentially ignoring the map. We got to see some nice Amsterdam scenes.
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| Urban Bees |
Amsterdam residents love flowers. We saw flowers in window boxes and in postage stamp size front yards all along the way. And lots of bees.
After about half an hour we looked around, expecting to see the Rijksmuseum. And there, right in front of us, was ... our hotel!
Starting over. This time we paid more attention to the map. With some effort, I was able to identify a few major landmarks on the map, giving us some idea of where we were and which way we were heading. Then, about half way, we ran into to couple from the hotel whom we had met the day before and who had been on the guided tour. They were returning from the Rijksmuseum and gave us good directions to it.
Amsterdam is a combination city and amusement park. Everywhere you go, you are crossing canals and watching boats and hearing music, like the bells from a nearby tower in this video:
(Video may not play on a mobile device.)
Finally we arrive at the Rijksmuseum.
The actual entrance to the museum is inside the tunnel that you see at the center of the building.
Inside the tunnel there was a small musical group playing classical music. Sounded very good.
The lobby is an atrium that is open for the entire height of the building. High above our heads was this structure. It wasn't clear to me whether this was a work or art or a trap.
We saw a lot of paintings and drawings by famous artists, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Dürer. I won't reproduce them here. The museum's web site does a much better job of that that I could do.
We came into the museum from the back and went out the front. In the front, there was another art exhibition:
Notice "amsterdam" spelled out in large three dimensional letters?
I didn't either.
We stopped by the central train station on the way back to the hotel. It bears an uncanny resemblance to the Rijksmuseum.
This is just the center of the station. The station extends for about a quarter of a mile in each direction.
We had heard that there were ATMs there where we could get Euros using an American ATM card. After about 15 minutes of looking, we finally asked a police officer for help. His English was not too good, and either he misunderstood us or we misunderstood him. We ended up at a bagel shop instead of an ATM. In front of the bagel shop, we met up with a train conductor and asked him for directions to the ATM. The conductor actually led us to the ATMs, taking about ten minutes and going past the police officer that we asked originally. The ATM did accept my card and we did get our Euros at the bank exchange rate.
The train station is across a canal from our hotel. As we walked to the hotel, we saw the guy in this rubber raft half-rappelling, half-jumping into the canal from where the people above are standing. The red and green object that is floating in the water is a rainbow wig that he was wearing, and lost as he plunged into the water. (This was the start of gay pride week in Amsterdam.) After climbing into the raft, with some difficulty, he eventually got it back. I suspect that alcohol may have been involved.
Back to the hotel. Beware of bicycles on the red pavement. Pedestrians should stay on the gray.
1 comment:
I've gotten lost too and fortunately somehow ended up were I started
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