Top 10 must-see places in the Netherlands
Top 10 must-see places in the Netherlands for you to take your travel to the next level: some very well-known sights, some less so!
Top 10 must-see places in the Netherlands for you to take your travel to the next level: some very well-known sights, some less so!
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!
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…
A review of the Amsterdam Cheese Museum, plus everything you ever wanted to know about Dutch cheese!
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 and other sights to see in Amsterdam that I like to visit and write about. That day, though, I wanted to see Below the Surface, an archeological exhibit…
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…
The short answer to the question in the title is “No, the Erotic Museum Amsterdam is not erotic.” What is it? Thought provoking and sometimes disturbing. Why I didn’t go to the Erotic Museum Amsterdam before You may remember that I reviewed the Sex Museum some time ago, calling it “the cure for insomnia.” I…
Getting off the tram with my son and daughter, my first indication that we were nearing our destination, Micropia Museum, was an arrow on a building with the text “only 80,000,000 micrometers to Micropia.” Micropia, a new exhibit at the ARTIS zoo in Amsterdam, bills itself as “the world’s first museum of microbes.” Disclosure: This…
Banksy and Dalí on show in one museum? When I heard that, I was definitely up for a day trip to Amsterdam to visit the new Moco Museum. Moco Museum Moco stands for Modern Contemporary Museum and, like the much better-known Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh museum, it is located on the Museumplein in Amsterdam. The…
You’ve probably heard of capsule hotels. First developed in Japan, capsule hotels keep costs down for guests by using the available space efficiently. Often stacked one above the other, the capsules are each the size of a single bed. You can’t even stand up in them, making them, as the comedian Jeanne Robertson (video below)…
Electric Ladyland in Amsterdam is definitely one of the weirdest museums I’ve visited yet. (Okay, the Toilet Museum in Suwon, South Korea, was pretty weird too, but this isn’t a contest. At least not yet … ) The museum claims to be the “first museum of fluorescent art.” It certainly includes a lot of fluorescent paint. Whether…
The founder of the Cat Cabinet, Bob Meijer, named his cat John Pierpont Morgan. Why name him after a 19th century American financier? I don’t know. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you click on one and make a purchase, I will receive a small percentage of what you spend. Born in 1966, J.P. Morgan received…
If you’ve ever wandered the UNESCO World Heritage-listed canal rings of Amsterdam, you’ve noticed the many houseboats moored along the canals. Have you ever wondered what they’re like on the inside? What’s it like to live in a houseboat? The Houseboat Museum Amsterdam gives a glimpse of that life: a very quick glimpse, given how…
If you find yourself with a few hours to kill at Amsterdam Central train station, there’s plenty to do right nearby. First of all, if you have shopping bags or luggage with you, don’t schlep them with you. Inside Amsterdam Central, on the right side of the building if you are looking at it from…
The first thing you see on entering the Sex Museum Amsterdam is a life size statue of Priapus, the Greek god of fertility, and he’s … well, let’s say he’s pretty turned on, and well-endowed. Review of the Sex Museum Amsterdam The rest of the museum goes downhill from there. Unfortunately, if I want to keep…
Once overlooked by travelers, the borough of Amsterdam Noord (Amsterdam North) has developed into a thriving artistic community, a spot for dance and music festivals, and an escape from Amsterdam’s chaotic and touristy center. This is – or, rather, was – a sponsored guest post, originally published by thehipmunk on Hipmunk’s Tailwind blog on December 10, 2015. The Hipmunk brand…
I was very happy when my daughter, visiting from the US, wanted to spend the day in Amsterdam, sightseeing with me. I gave her a list of museums I’d like to visit for my series on Amsterdam museums and other sights, and told her to choose two. My daughter, a graphic designer, chose the Spectacles…
“That was pretty interesting” is high praise indeed, when it comes from my 17-year-old son after a visit to a museum. The Verzetsmuseum – the Dutch Resistance Museum – in Amsterdam is one of very few that have earned a “pretty interesting” from him. Documenting not just the resistance movement during World War II, but…
What I expected on visiting Red Light Secrets Museum of Prostitution was a presentation that titillates and that presents prostitution as a happy profession with practitioners who choose to become prostitutes. Note: I’ve updated this post with some remarks from a “part time excort whore” who commented on it on Twitter. See below. Disclosure: This post contains…
It’s not surprising that Amsterdam is home to a museum of Hash, Marijuana and Hemp, given its generally tolerant policy toward soft drugs. You’d think, given the somewhat subversive subject, that it would be entertaining to visit. It wasn’t. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you click on one and make a purchase, I…
Added in May 2021: I just found out that this museum closed in April 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. I’ll leave the review here as it is, in case anyone is interested in what it was like. For the sake of full transparency and before I describe my impressions of Tassenmuseum Hendrikje, the…
Warning: If you’re squeamish, you might want to click away…but please share this post before you go! Body Worlds: The Happiness Project exhibit in Amsterdam is described on its webpage like this: “More than 200 anatomical specimens of real human bodies show the complexity, resilience and vulnerability of the body.” In other words, at Body Worlds…
You could easily be forgiven if, at first, you just walk by the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam. You might notice that it’s pretty, but so are so many houses along the old canal rings. Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That means I’ll receive a small commission on anything you buy through clicking the links….
After the Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder museum and The Canal House Museum, our last stop was the van Loon Museum, a restored Golden Age canal house. This is what I’d been expecting when we visited the Canal House Museum: rooms that give an impression of how wealthy residents of Amsterdam’s Golden Age lived and, to…
I already posted about the first of the three little museums I visited in Amsterdam with a friend: Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder. After a bite for lunch—Burgermeester has surprisingly good burgers!—we moved on to the Canal House Museum Amsterdam (In Dutch it’s called Het Grachtenhuis.). It’s not surprising that a canal house museum is housed…
Tourists in Amsterdam, if they visit museums at all, generally hit the big ones: the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh, for example. But there are dozens of smaller museums in Amsterdam that are just as interesting and worth seeing. Ons Lieve Heer op Solder is one of them. Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If…
I’m not a museum person. That’s not to say I’m not interested in art, or natural history, or science, or whatever the museum is about. It’s just that I don’t have the patience to concentrate on one thing for very long. At the same time, I’m not physically up to it; for some reason standing…