I’m trying to learn how to pace myself! In the past few cities I’ve been so excited to see everything that I do it all in one day when I don’t have to and it leads to a bit of off days and weirdness in my schedule. So I tried to get to the outliers today and do the central things tomorrow. Welcome to Amsterdam folks!
First, I love the metro here! It’s so much cleaner and nicer than the London Tube and it feels more like an art instillation than anything, I’ll have to grab a picture tomorrow for you. Anyway, a short metro ride and I was ready to wander through to De Pijp, which I heard was a cute little neighborhood and worth a wander through… I guess wandered through the wrong part because I didn’t see anything particularly special about it. However, I did cross over several canals and the number of bikes in this city is nuts! Bikes everywhere, there are even bike lanes on the roads!
I wandered over to Vandlepark, which is kind of like the central park of Amsterdam. Somehow I ended up passing all the way through in like 5 minutes because it’s so narrow but it is pretty long and while there weren’t too many people just hanging out, there plenty of people biking around and taking their dogs on walks. It is a beautiful park though and I found some unexpected statues. Also, and if you go back you can see them in previous cities, but there are padlocks on a lot of the bridges I’ve seen around Europe, including Tower Bridge in London.
That done I went to the Van Goh Museum… I tried waiting in line but about 10 minutes in I got hungry and had to abandon ship for lunch, I definitely recommend buying your tickets in advance! It gave me the chance to meander my way back up towards my hostel though and I have to say the narrow streets and sidewalks are not very fun but the city itself is quite an impressive place. Mostly it’s the canals that got me, there’s one on almost every street it seems and the bikes are sort of overrunning everything since people will chain their bikes just about anywhere.
Turns out I made it all the way up to central station before I realized I should have turned some ways back. Either way, St Nichlas’ was there, I missed visiting hours, which are kind of weird but I’ll try again tomorrow and the Maritime Museum was there and while it’s really just a big white building, there’s a ship wreck looking building that’s worth a visit too, simply because it’s cool.
And that was my day, I’ll do more tomorrow since I actually saved things to do tomorrow! Which means hopefully we can keep avoiding days that lack the pictures they deserve!