Day 3 - Amsterdam

Today was unintentionally a light day. The plan was to go to some of the museums in Amsterdam. Well, when you don't get up until noon...

The first place we went was Rembrandt's House. He lived there for 20 years and bought the house in 1634 for 13,000 guilders but couldn't pay the mortgage. He ended up having to sell everything he owned, which was how the curators were able to know what was in the house.
Jodenbreestraat 4 - Rembrandt's House.
Bust of Rembrandt in the courtyard of his house. The green door to the right led to the kitchen.

John in the kitchen of the house
Where the maid slept.


There was a lot of art in the house. Not all of it was Rembrandt's work. One of my favorites was this one of broken pottery. The interesting thing was that they had the actual pots that were used as the model for the painting in a display.

The stairs let up to the studio which was a large open space with lots of windows. Most of the stairs that we've encountered over here have been very narrow and winding. There's not a lot of room to maneuver.
The chair in the entrance hall. This is room is where customers would wait. If you were sitting in this chair, you could see all the stuff going on out on the street. This immediately brought to mind my grandmother. This would have been her chair.

Outside the house, we had a hot dog from a street vendor. The hot dogs here are little different that what you get at home. The texture is different. Still, it was good.

These places were everywhere but this one was the most obviously named.

Next we took a cab to the Van Gogh museum. No photos in the museum. It was so crowded in there that you couldn't get close enough to see any of the pictures. We left pretty soon after we got there. The crowds were getting to us so we didn't go to the other museum. Instead we took a cab to Centraal Station to figure out how to get our tickets to Brussels.
Centraal Station - Amsterdam.

It was a mad house here as well but then, you'd expect it here. In looking for the place to get tickets, we came across a Burger King so John got a snack. This is where we found out that condiments are extra. John asked for ketchup and the girl said it was .45 extra.

We didn't see a lot of American restaurants here. There's was McDonald's, of course. We saw Burger King, KFC and Subway. The only Starbucks we saw was at the train station and the line was always long.

Something else I noticed here is that the workers here - maybe just in fast food - are un-apologetically slow. They are just not in a hurry. Being from the US where McDonald's will time how long it takes you to get your order, it's a bit odd. It's definitely cultural. Here, people will get to you when they get to you. I wanted to find out what the work day was. I don't think people started at 8 am there unless you were a tour guide.

We finally found where we needed to buy the tickets and decided to go ahead and get them, thus avoiding the lines on the actual day we needed to travel. From here, we walked back to our hotel to make sure we felt comfortable with the distance - keeping in mind that we'd be pulling our suitcases behind us.

About 50 steps outside the train station, the sky opened up and dumped rain. It was weird. We ran over to one of the nearby shops that had a little awning to try and take cover. So did everyone else. It was kind of good because being buried behind all those people, I didn't get wet. After about 5 minutes, it stopped completely and everyone went on their way like nothing happened.

Waiting in line for the train tickets took up the better part of the afternoon. So, we headed back to the hotel to rest up for dinner.

When we headed back out, we found a cafe and sat out and people watched. That was nice and Amsterdam is a great place to do it.