On Boat Bike Tours, the boat serves as a floating hotel while guests go cycling. Read this review of their Northern route trip and a comparison of their standard vs. premium ships, plus some tips!
Amsterdam Tulip Museum review
Did you know that Rembrandt sold his painting, The Night Watch, in 1642 for 1,600 guilders? Just five years earlier, a single tulip bulb had sold for 5,200 guilders. Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That means I’ll receive a small commission on anything you buy through clicking the links. This will not affect your…
Amsterdam Cheese Museum review + all about Dutch cheese!
Amsterdam Cheese Museum isn’t really a museum: it’s a shop. It’s a very nice shop, mind you, where you get to taste lots of different Dutch cheeses before making a purchase. A bonus is that everything is labeled in English. The museum part, however, is pretty minimal, but at least it’s free. Getting to the…
A complete SAIL Amsterdam 2020 guide
It’s unusual for me to write an article about something that hasn’t happened yet, but SAIL Amsterdam only happens once every five years: best to be prepared! Here’s your complete SAIL Amsterdam 2020 guide, but in the form of a work in progress. I promise to keep updating as the event nears. News flash: SAIL…
The Willet-Holthuysen Museum: An elegant Golden Age house in Amsterdam
Many tourists visiting Amsterdam come to see the beautiful buildings in the old center. The UNESCO site – officially called “the Seventeenth-Century Canal Ring Area of Amsterdam inside the Singelgracht” – is lined with elegant “Golden Age” houses. It’s very picturesque and very Instagrammable. You can see a few of them on the inside: one…
Muiderslot Castle (a.k.a. Amsterdam Castle)
When you were little, did you ever draw a picture of a castle? If you were like me, the castle in your picture was square, with a tower in each corner, crenellations along the walls and a drawbridge to an arched gateway in front. I’ve been to a lot of castles in my travels, but…
Eating Europe’s Jordaan Food Tour: A review
Rows of pretty small houses and shopping streets lined with a mixture of hip and quirky stores, along with a smattering of “coffee shops” leaking the reek of marijuana out onto the sidewalk: this used to be my image of Amsterdam’s Jordaan neighborhood. It never occurred to me until I took a Jordaan food tour…
Amsterdam Historical Museum
I visited the Amsterdam Historical Museum (more properly just called the Amsterdam Museum) as an afterthought. It was on my list: one of the many small museums in Amsterdam that I like to visit and write about. That day, though, I wanted to see Below the Surface, an archeological exhibit in Rokin metro station. But…
Below the Surface in Amsterdam
When I went to see Below the Surface in Amsterdam, to be honest, I hadn’t done my research. Just a quick internet search, and I added it to my list of what I might see that day in Amsterdam. I expected a museum, a small one, in or near Rokin metro station, since that was…