The Netherlands 2026, Part Two: Rotterdam & the Hague

Thursday, July 30 Rotterdam Centraal I have to admit, much as I went out of my way to find cool libraries on this trip. the truly architecturally interesting buildings in the Netherlands have rather tended to be the train stations—particularly the Central Stations, or rather, in this case, "Rotterdam Centraal." The underground train platforms are of course all pretty similar, but the exterior buildings are very distinctive. In the case of Rotterdam, Centraal Station would be one of many structures with a single distinction in common: having been built within the past 80 years, because Rotterdam was the most extensively destroyed city by bombings in World War II. Since a huge portion of it—and basically all of its city center—has been rebuilt since, the city is known for its modern architecture. In the case of Rotterdam Centraal, there was no central station prior to the war, but an original Rotterdam Centraal built in 1957; and the current building opened in 2014. There is a 12-foot (3.6m) bronze statue of a Black woman standing on the plaza outside the main entrance, which I assumed to be a permanent installation there but is apparently planned to be in place for five years, since its first unveiling in 2023. The woman is not a real person, but reportedly the same fictional character as that of another statue that was installed in London in 2020.
The Depot Rotterdam I had eight points of interest marked to check off on our day trip to Rotterdam—having traveled there by NS Rail, the Netherlands' national railway; one way-tickets cost us each €18.70 ($21.45), and it took about 40 minutes from Station Duivendrecht on an InterCity Direct train (there are no such trains direct from Amsterdam Centraal for some reason). We had to take a 6-stop Metro ride from our hotel to Station Duivendrecht, making the overall journey to Rotterdam—about 48 miles or 78 km—about 65 minutes by train. This was only five minutes or so more than it would have taken to drive a car. Anyway, once actually in Rotterdam, some of my eight points of interest to check off did not quite pan out. One of these was The Depot, a very cool, reflective, bowl-shaped building with its own rooftop area that can be accessed with a museum ticket, and of course was my primary interest in it. Our first stop on a total combined five-mile loop around the city center was the Euromast (we'll get to that next), and I had no idea we'd be walking right past the Depot, the world's first publicly accessible art depot, where they store art for the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. I took just a few quick pictures while walking by; we actually would have just gone in then but it was not yet 10:30 a.m. and they did not open until 11:00. I thought it was on the route coming back, but it turns out I somehow made a mistake on its location and we were too far from it to stop there before returning to Rotterdam Centraal at the end of the day.
Euromast And now for Rotterdam's answer to the Space Needle! Except, in this case, it's more like the Space Needle was Seattle's answer to the Euromast—which finished construction in 1960 for the Floriade, a horticultural exhibition and garden festival in Rotterdam. When the Euromast first opened, though, it stood at a height of 331 ft (101 m), making it the tallest structure in Rotterdam at the time, a title it lost to Erasmus Medical Center in 1968. In the above shot, the original height would have been just to the observatory you see roughly halfway up.
But! Then, in 1970, they added the "Space Tower," which even today is an add-on with additional cost to your admission ticket—which of course I still went for. I'm only going there once, after all. This addition added 275 ft (84m) to the height, giving it a total height of 606 ft (184.6 m). This is one foot taller than the Space Needle, but the Euromast's observatory and restaurant is at the roughly 300-ft (91.4 m) level, with the much smaller, but revolving structure affixed to the "Space Tower"—which they currently brand the "Euroscoop"—being basically a kind of ride you get in and ascend to the structure's total height.
This is the spectacular view of central Rotterdam from the Space Tower on the Euromast. In the second shot above you'll see a brief video I took while we were riding around in it. (Side note: Euromast is now the second-tallest structure in Rotterdam, behind the 705-ft / 215-m De Zalmhaven ("The Salmon Harbor") tower. This is the tallest building seen at center-left in the above tower, and we actually tried to visit the bar, Celest, on the 57th and 58th floors of the 61-story tower. But, they didn't open until 5:00 and we were too early, so, another item on my Rotterdam list unable to come to fruition. Disappointing!)
Spido Harbour Tour This was Shobhit's one major request for Rotterdam: a harbour tour. He really wanted to see Port of Rotterdam, because of its pretty notable significance: between 1962 and 2004, it was the world's busiest port by annual cargo tonnage. Since then, it has been overtaken by around ten Asian ports (today the top 5 are in China), but Rotterdam remains the largest port in Europe. It opened in the 14th century, and currently covers about 49 square miles, both water and land; connecting the Nieuwe Waterweg (a 12.7-mile / 20.5 km canal built opened in 1872—central Rotterdam is actually 19 miles or 30 km from the North Sea) with the Nieuwe Maas River. The Port of Rotterdam stretches about 42 km or 26 miles end to end. There are multiple companies that do Harbour Tours, but we chose Spido, largely because it was included on the one-day Rotterdam City Card we purchased. This City Card works differently from Amsterdam's, in that it offers only discounts and not free passes; most of the discounts are 25% off, as was the case here. The cards cost only €7.50 each, so we easily got our money's worth with those kinds of discounts. In the above shot you see the actual boat we boarded for the tour, which took 75 minutes and sailed only a portion of that massive port, albeit by moving into dead-end arms of it and turning back around two or three different times.
At Shobhit's suggestion, we sat in the open-air seating area on the very top of the boat, which certainly gave us the best views, but we often could not quite hear the English portions of the tour narration. It was still fun, and the only downside was how cloudy it was in Rotterdam most of the day we were there (thankfully it was much less so while we went up the Euromast, which was the first thing we walked to from Centraal Station), the only mostly-cloudy day we had during our first week in the Netherlands, which was mostly sunny and quite hot.
Fenix Museum De Zalmhaven was on our itinerary to walk to next, as it is maybe only a block or two from where we boarded the Spido boat. But, as I said, we found Celest to be closed and could not go up. But, Shobhit did notice this interesting structure with a spiraling silver observatory of some kind on top, and he wanted to walk across the Erasmus Bridge anyway. This was a roughly one-mile walk from where we boarded the Spido Harbour Tour, and when we arrived we found it to be a museum: Fenix, an art museum about migration. Exhibits included a Suitcase Labyrinth (I did not fully register at the time that this whole museum was dedicated to migration, so now the suitcases make sense); multiple sections of art displays, including a photography exhibit; and of course the architectural centerpiece, the "Tornado," which consists of two wooden staircases inside what look from a distance like stainless steel tubes. They connect each floor and the viewing platform on top of the building.
Erasmus Bridge The Erasmus Bridge, an architectural centerpiece of Rotterdam, was not specifically on my list either, but Shobhit decided he wanted to walk across it. Completed in 1996, it features a 456-ft (139-m) pylon with a bent shape that apparently earned it the nickname "The Swan." This bridge has a total length of 2,631 ft (802 m).
Markthal I was pretty thrilled by the discovery of Markthal ("Market Hall") in my pre-trip research on Rotterdam. This is a public market entirely enclosed by a horseshoe-shaped, residential building, some of the homes in which have windows overlooking the market. The ceiling is beautifully painted, and the "holes" on either end are actually glass walls. This would obviously be the best public market to go to on a rainy day, There are many restaurant establishments with rooftop seating on a second level. I tried to go up a staircase to get a photo, only to be met by a young man asking if I wanted seating for two. When I said I just wanted to get a picture of the view, he said there were no photos allowed there, and there was a staircase off to the side of the market that could be used for that. I'm sure I could have gotten photos if we had actually been seated, but we already had a snack at a place I saw recommended by a YouTuber sharing tips about Rotterdam: we went to a place called Tofu Heaven and had seasoned fried tofu that was absolutely delicious.
An exterior shot of Markthal. This was easily one of the coolest things we saw in Rotterdam. The 12-story structure apparently contains 228 apartments.
Cube Houses Thankfully, given we only had a day trip to Rotterdam, all of our points of interest I assembled were within a five-mile loop walk from Amsterdam Centraal Station—and the last few were all just a few blocks from each other: the Cube Houses are only about a block and a half walk from Markthal. People also actually live in these—including, we discovered only when we arrived, the guy operating the "Kijk-Kubus Museum-house" (Show Cube Museum-house). This museum is literally his own home, which he has lived in since the complex opened 42 years ago, in 1984! He just mans a little desk up the entrance during regular business hours, with most rooms very tidy with minimalist decor, and a few rooms blocked from public access. But, he told us it's his home he lives in when the museum is not open. A few spots did have cabinets full of stuff in them, though, such as this one with a ton of Star Wars memorabilia in it. We had some slight confusion when we first arrived, because the Museum-house was definitely the one we wanted, but at first we went up another that had a vibe of being much more recent; someone evidently took one of the units and painted all over its interior. I'm glad we figured out the clarification and went to the original guy. As far as I know, the rest of the units are just people living in them as regular homes.
Rotterdam Central Library I took this shot on our way from Markthal to the Cube Houses—this building is across the public square from the east end of Markthal—and I had no idea it's the usual building for the Rotterdam Central Public Library. I just thought it was interesting with all its giant yellow tubing wrapped around its exterior. Then, after some slight trouble finding it, we got to what I only much later learned is the temporary location of their Central Library—no wonder it wasn't all that architecturally remarkable! It turns out the original library building closed for renovations last year, and is set to reopen with a new addition in either late 2028 or early 2029, depending on the source. Still, as has become our custom when exploring the Central Public Library in new cities, we worked our way to the top of the current, temporary building—or at the very least, the top floor we could access, which was floor 7, I believe—and worked our way back down to the bottom. The Central Library in Amsterdam was much more interesting, but now I know why; if we had been in Amsterdam a year earlier or three years later, the Rotterdam Central Library would clearly have been the more interesting one.
Friday, July 31 Den Haag Centraal The Hague was somewhat of a mixed bag, at least when compared to Rotterdam, where there are far more things to do; but, I'm still really glad we went, even if three of the things on my list for this city either didn't pan out at all or didn't pan out the way I wanted them to. Shobhit got to a point about halfway through the day when he felt like we might have been better off staying in Amsterdam, but I was all about making the most of the day. Side note: Den Haag Centraal Station is itself pretty cool, especially from inside. To the left you can see the elevated platform that the trains run through; it can also be seen from outside the station here.
Royal Library of the Netherlands The Royal Library of the Netherlands is quite close to Den Haag Centraal, but guess what? There is no public access to the book shelves! Not unless you have a membership, anyway. A young woman working a reception counter in the very lovely lobby area noted that we could view some of the book stacks through windows on one side of the room. Then Shobhit noticed coffee at a little coffee machine in this reception area, and that became the most exciting part of the visit, for him. While walking through the connected National Archive building on our way out, he spilled some of that coffee on the floor. A very nice woman working another nearby little cafe not only gave him some napkins to wipe it up with, but offered to let him come behind the counter and wash his hands in her sink afterward.
Peace Palace I tried very, very hard to book a guided tour at The Hague's Peace Palace, which houses both the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. It opened in 1913 with the help of the Carnegie Foundation (which Andrew Carnegie created just for this purpose, so it could be funded legally), 14 years after the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, from which the Permanent Court of Arbitration was born. Anyway, touring buildings and institutions like this is sometimes tricky business, with things like timed entry, limited availability, and minimum time beforehand needed for booking. I tried several times to book a guided tour over the few weeks before our trip, but no availability would show up on their online calendar. We walked to the building anyway, and I'm glad we did: it turns out there were no guided tours happening that day, no public access to the building at all—but, their visitor center was still open, which is large enough and full of enough displays that we could still do an audio tour, and so we did. I will admit we rushed through it a bit; I was disappointed not to get inside the building, but what I did see and hear was still very interesting.
The Hague Tower Here's one that it seemed was not going to pan out—and then it did! The Hague Tower, which you can only climb to its ~85-meter (~279 ft) observatory with a guided tour at 2:00, which was not fully clear to us when we first reached the tower at about 1:10, and the door was closed and locked on the side with just a small poster about visiting the tower. There was no wifi available right there, so we went to a nearby restaurant that turned out to be spectacular, called Zebedeüs. Shobhit had gone immediately to the bathroom when we sat at our table, and the young waiter immediately came up and started speaking to me in Dutch. When I apologized and said I only spoke English, he immediately switched to his own very good English, which is quite common. I did get wifi at this restaurant, and the waiter even tried to help us with what little he knew about The Hague Tower's hours of operation, but between that and certain pages of their website only loading in Dutch, we didn't get anywhere. Instead, we ordered a burrata dish that was spectacular; and then, when we discovered their wifi password was "pecan pie," we decided that clearly meant we had to have a slice of their pecan pie. Both were so good that we told our young waiter that Zebedeüs was the best place we had been so far in The Hague, which made him very happy.
But, we hadn't been to The Hague Tower yet! And when we were done at Zebedeüs, we walked back over to the tower, right at 2:00, and this time they were not only open, but had openings for the guided tour, which involved climbing 288 steps on very narrow staircases. It actually was kind of exhausting—but worth it! There are three landing levels where we could rest for a bit and our volunteer tour guide could speak to us all—for the first quarter or so of the tour, he spoke first in Dutch and then in English, having been told the tour would need to be bilingual; it turned out there were no Dutch people on the tour, though, and the one family he thought was Dutch was actually German. They told him he could just do the entire tour in English. Anyway, the above shot was one I took when the tour guide told us they used the same carpenters as those who make the Netherlands' famous windmills to construct the wooden beams in this tower. One of the landings was also just below the tower's four bells, all of which are centuries old, like the tower itself; I even got a very brief video of the last incredibly loud gong while we were standing beneath them ("I warned you!" the tour guide said, shortly after the ringing scared the shit out of several of us).
But, of course, here's why I really wanted to go up The Hague Tower: the view! I researched at least one observation deck of some kind or another in every city we planned to visit, and this was the only one I found in the Hague. This city, at about 549,000 within its city limits, is the third-largest in the Netherlands—but, it is the most densely populated, at 17,200/sq mi (6,650/km2). Compare to Amsterdam, the largest city with nearly twice the city population, with a fourth-highest density of 13,670/sq mi (5,277/km2). For comparison purposes for people local to my own Seattle region, Seattle's density is 9,302.2/sq mi (3,591.59/km2). It's worth noting that of all non-microstates in Europe, the Netherlands has the highest overall population density. This is a region roughly the size of the U.S. states of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined, with a total population of about 18.4 million people. (The combined population of Massachusetts and Connecticut is about 10.8 million.) Anyway, this high density in the Hague is clearly reflected in its city center skyline, the only one among the Dutch major cities where nearly all of its tall buildings are close together in one area. In both Amsterdam and Rotterdam, for example, there are multiple smaller clusters of building skylines in different parts of the city. So: I don't know if Shobhit would agree, even though he clearly did also enjoy the Hague Tower tour (this is part of the St. James Church, built between the 14th and 16th centuries, but for me, this alone made it worth the day trip to the Hague. [posted 9:22am]

The Netherlands 2026, Part One: IAmsterdam

Saturday, July 25 The Club SEA Shobhit actually signed up for a US Bank Altitude Connect credit card (they should really give me a kickback for linking to that) just for this purpose: to gain access to the lounges at SeaTac Airport. The first leg of our flight, which was to Reykjavic, left out of Concourse S, so we went into "The Club SEA" there—both our first time. Was it really all that special? Honestly, not really—but, still worth going to. It had its positives and negatives. Let's go through them! Negatives: Presumably the bathrooms in there are meant to be nicer than regular airport bathrooms (??), but the men's room here had only two toilet stalls, one of which was out of order; and two sinks, one of which was also out of order. I know this was just temporary, but it was still kind of a disappointingly janky setup in there. Also, the food in this lounge is unlimited and free, but still had limited options for us as vegetarians. We had a tofu salad and some mini caprese sandwiches, along with a bit of crackers and cheese. And finally, my second lemongrass margarita was honestly kind of gross, thanks to different bartenders mixing the few cocktails on the menu in very different ways. Positives: What food we were able to eat was actually very good—the desserts in particular were delicious. And, to give the first bartender we used some credit, my first lemongrass margarita was shockingly delicious. (We each had three cocktails, of which there was no limit, unless we were visibly drunk, they said—which of course we never were; these were not stiff drinks.) And finally, of course, being a lounge, there was much more comfortable seating than your average seat in the airport, although I can't say it felt particularly less crowded. It was definitely worth it for me, of course, since I gained access as a plus-one on Shobhit's credit card and I didn't have to get a new credit card of my own!
Sunday, July 26 Icelandair This was our first time flying Icelandair, and honestly, I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. The complete lack of amenities made it feel like an international version of Frontier Airlines—nearly everything had an extra fee, though at least I was able to get tea on the flight without paying extra. But snacks? Nope—not so much as peanuts; any food cost money. Shobhit is used to international flights providing free booze, and we didn't have that either (though he did quite easily manage to get a shot of rum from the lounge into a coffee cub to take onto the flight, along with like six of the mini caprese sandwiches inside a food container). On the other hand, the scheduling went like clockwork. I was slightly worried about how tightly we were cutting it with just an 85-minute layover in Reykjavik, but with the first flight leaving right on time, we had just enough time to get through with perfect timing—including Passport Control, as entering Iceland qualified as the point at which we entered the "European Economic Area" (not the European Union, a fascinating distinction). This also meant that our flight from Reykjavik to Amsterdam functioned as a domestic flight, which was wonderfully convenient. The above shot is from the boarding ramp onto our second flight, out of Reykjavik. (Okay, technically it was Keflavik, which is about 31 miles or 50 km outside of Reykjavik.) I quite liked that their ramps had windows, which in the U.S. they never do. It's the little things! Anyway, the flight to Reykjavik was about seven hours; the layover was 85 minutes; and the flight from Reykjavik to Amsterdam was about two and a half hours, making the entire journey about 11 hours. Jet lag was a bit of a thing for several days in Amsterdam, as you can imagine, having day and night basically flipped. I still didn't feel like my sleep schedule fully acclimated to the new time zone even a full week into the trip.
Wittenberg by Cove The canal seen here—there are 165 canals in Amsterdam, totaling 62 miles (100km) in cumulative length; there are more here than in Venice—is called Nieuwe Keizersgracht, and it runs alongside our first Amsterdam hotel, Wittenberg by Cove. These are basically rentable apartments, as we always look for places with kitchens so we can save on food spending, especially on trips of this magnitude. You can barely see the word WITTENBERG in gold lettering in the above shot, just to the right of the tree on the far left and just above a lamppost. Wittenberg consists of several buildings with courtyards between them, and it was a bit of a maze getting to our third-floor unit three buildings in—it took about two and a half minutes to get up there from the street. Side note: when I say "third floor," if you're American then I mean the fourth floor. Oddly, other countries don't start counting floors until you go one floor up. This hotel's elevators literally mark the ground floor as "0." That makes no sense to me as it would suggest there is no floor there but whatever!
Albert Heijn grocery store We found a grocery store about three and a half blocks from our hotel, and guess what? This is for the PCC people: electronic shelf labels (ESLs) on every product! Also, of course: Dutch writing. It was immediately a bit of a fascinating experience navigating the Netherlands, which was the first place I have ever visited where the native language was not English. People tend to speak to each other in Dutch by default, naturally, but virtually everyone also speaks English, and everyone we encountered was totally used to speaking in English. If Shobhit accidentally bumped into someone at the grocery store and said, "Sorry," they would say "It's okay," without thinking about it. The actual product labels were a bit of a challenge, though; both those and the shelf tags were in Dutch. I found myself looking up certain words in Google Translate, like "Whole Wheat." (A young woman at the bakery didn't know how to translate the word, and actually asked us, "Do you speak Dutch?" I had to say, "I'm sorry, we don't." But, eventually it occurred to me I could just get assistance with my phone, thanks to so many businesses offering free wifi, including this grocery store.) Side note: I was a little overly delighted by their shopping carts, on which all four wheels were on swivels. You could push them both forward and sideways!
Monday, July 27 Van Gogh Museum We had a nearby person take this shot of us on our way out of the Van Gogh Museum, in front of a giant print of his Almond Blossom painting as the backdrop. I just really love this photo, which turned out even better than I anticipated. Shortly before this, I went looking for one of the few souvenirs I actually wanted for this entire trip: I decided while I was there that I wanted a 1000-piece Van Gogh painting puzzle.
Stedeleijk Museum The Stedelijk Museum, which features modern and contemporary art, is right next to the Van Gogh Museum, on the Museumplein along with several notable museums; this one was founded in 1874, and has been on the Museumplein since 1895, the current, very modern building (apparently nicknamed "The Bathtub") constructed in 2012. For the brief time we were there, we saw a lot of furniture on display—such as the chairs in and atop glas cubic compartments seen through the doorway in the above shot, like a bunch of gogo chairs at a chair dance club. This was the first place we used our "IAmsterdam City Card" (the Van Gogh Museum does not participate), which can be purchased to cover from one to five days, and we bought a three-day pass. I looked around online to see how worth it this card is, and multiple people said it's only a good value if you cram in a bunch of stuff each day—well, that's what we specialize in! We bought a three-day pass, and used it four times the first day; twice the second day; and twice the third day. We very much got our money's worth, especially since the card can also be used for any of the city transit (but not any regional or national transit, even within the city, but public transit here is quite extensively accessible so it still worked out great). The card activates as soon as you use it the first time and then sets a clock based on hours, so it actually worked 72 hours from the moment we used it at the Stedelijk Museum, at about 12:30 on Monday.
Moco Museum (Modern Contemporary Museum) The Moco Museum was not even on my list, but we happened to see it also on the Museumplein, and they said they accepted the IAmsterdam Card, so we went in. On display was a bunch of famous art from the past several decades, including art by Bansky, Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and more. A lot of it was very cool, but my favorite photo taken there was this one, in which I had no idea it hilariously featured Shobhit's face only from the nose up, looking up at the banana on the ceiling.  
Rijksmuseum / Cuypers Library We all know that Matthew loves a beautiful library! I went seeking the Cuypers Library, located inside the Rijksmuseum, which is both the national museum of the Netherlands and the most frequently visited museum in the country. Cuypers Library itself, while not appearing especially huge in person, is the oldest and largest art historical library in the Netherlands. We did not dwell there long, but we did roam around the broader Rijksmuseum a bit, since our City Card also granted access there. We were there for a little over an hour. Some of the paintings depict some pretty fucked up shit.
Royal Palace of Amsterdam The Royal Palace of Amsterdam was also something we had to pay for separately, which Shobhit did not find to be a good value but I was really glad we got to tour it. The above shot was taken in the Tribunal. Why does this guy need to be nude in order to conduct a beheading? I'm not complaining. I just want to know! Maybe it's a laundry thing. Nobody wants neck blood all over their good toga. I guess that makes sense.
Amsterdam Centraal Station All of the city Central Stations in the Netherlands are spelled with an extra A in "Centraal," evidently because that is how the Dutch do. In the case of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Centraal has a quite beautiful building that was constructed in 1889. It's also quite large, today accommodating 11 platforms and 15 tracks, along with basically a shopping mall inside, much like Penn Station in New York. And although Amsterdam is the largest city in the Netherlands (population 946,447; though its metropolitan population of about 2.5 million is second to the combined Rotterdam-Hague metro population of 2.7 million; either of these are roughly equivalent to the metropolitan areas of Portland, Oregon or Austin, Texas), Amsterdam Centraal is actually the second-busiest train station behind that of Utrecht, the Netherlands' fourth-largest city, because of Utrecht's more centralized location in the country. But what fascinates me most about the train station is the bicycle garage—Utrecht's train station actually features the largest bike garage in the world, opened in 2019 with space for 12,500 bicycles in three subterranean levels. The bicycle claim to fame here in Amsterdam, though, is the opening of the "Stationseiland" bike garage in 2023, this one being the largest in Amsterdam and accommodating 7,000 bicycles—and constructed under the water of the Open Havenfront, the body of water in front of the station which is connected to Amsterdam's extensive network of canals. It has a very cool design, and as you can see, contains thousands of bicycles as far as the eye can see. In the above shot, the bikes in the foreground are rentals, and in the background you can see multi-level bicycle parking for commuters. Being such a bike-crazy city, of course I have worn my bicycle earrings more than once, and they always elicit compliments from people.
A'dam Lookout Welcome to Amsterdam's answer to the Space Needle! Or maybe more specifically Amsterdam's answer to Vancouver, B.C.'s Harbour Centre, which also features a revolving restaurant and observation deck atop an office building. Vancouver's building was constructed in 1977 and has always had the restaurant perched atop—it's a 28-story building below the restaurant and observatory that takes its total height to 482 ft (147 m). In the case of Amsterdam's A'dam Lookout—the structure atop the building to the far left in the above shot—the original building was a 22-story tower opened as Overhoeks Tower in 1971, but rebranded as the 94-meter (308 ft) A'dam Tower in 2014 and with the new observation deck opening in 2017. I had a lot of fun visiting this building, of course, but was very amused by its presentation as this impressively-tall observation deck, which is barely more than half the height of Seattle's Space Needle—and, indeed, merely the 18th-tallest building in Amsterdam itself. Amsterdam has three separate areas with clusters of tall buildings, and the five or so in this cluster includes at least two that are taller than A'dam Tower ("Amsterdam Dance and Music") alone. That said, A'dam Tower is across the IJ River from the city center of Amsterdam, the old area with all of the canals and no particularly tall buildings, so there was nothing to obscure views from this vantage point. We even timed our visit to coincide with the sunset, which worked out well.
Red Light District We actually first went from A'dam Lookout to check out the LuminAir rooftop bar on the 11th floor of the Doubletree Hotel, which had some nice views but they saved us the cost of ordering anything by having terrible service (acknowledging that the Dutch clearly have a different sense of "customer service" than Americans do) and so we left. From there we walked over to our first time checking out the nearby Red Light District, at around 10:30 in the evening. This area, particularly at night with sex workers standing in red-lit windows at regular intervals along narrow alleyways, is of course difficult to get much in the way of pictures—I had already been warned by a friend who had been here before that very aggressive people will come out of the woodwork to demand you delete any photos taken of the women, for their quite understandable protection. Instead, I took just a few carefully framed wide shots with no red-lit windows visible. My guess is 10:30 p.m. was actually kind of early; the area was teeming with people, clearly mostly tourists just like us. I saw a YouTube video recently by a local guy who called the city center "basically Disneyland," and while I don't think that's quite fair as a broad generalization, it is a fair description of several specific areas—which would include, somewhat amusingly, the Red Light District (the fact that there is no "Disney Red Light Land" notwithstanding). I wondered if there's a certain time later at night when the crowd has more serious potential customers. Because we were clearly not that. (Also, many of the women in windows were so seriously made up they kind of looked to me like human Barbie dolls. But hey, maybe you're into that. No judgement!)
Tuesday, July 28 National Holocaust Names Monument The National Holocaust Names Monument is located all of about two blocks from our first hotel; I only knew about it because I noticed it marked on maps when first researching the area. It features walls bearing the names of 102,000 Holocaust victims not given a proper burial. Viewed from above, the walls spell out four Hebrew letters that together translate as "In Memory of." These walls also all have geometrically designed reflective shapes placed on top of them, giving the entire monument a beautiful design suggestive of quite literal reflection.
Hortus Botanicus The Hortus Botanicus was not on my original list of things to do, but it was covered by the IAmsterdam City Card, and I do enjoy a good botanical garden. Plus, it also turned out to be all of two blocks from our first hotel—actually it was one block away, but a two-block walk due to it being on the other side of a canal. This botanical garden was established in 1638, making it one of the world's oldest. Speaking of which, I realized shortly after arriving that Amsterdam, a city itself founded in the late 13th century, is by a huge margin now the oldest city I have ever been to. This, of course, was to be expected with my first-ever visit to Europe, having previously only been to the U.S., Canada, and Australia—all countries established by colonizers from Europe.
NEMO Science Museum Rooftop Square The IAmsterdam City card also covers tickets to the NEMO Science Museum, which is in a structure that looks at first like a giant sinking ship, but is actually designed to mimic the adjacent IJ Tunnel.   We didn't bother with the museum, though. It should come as no surprise to you that my interest lay in the NEMO Rooftop Square, access to which is actually free during museum hours. There's also a cafeteria up near the top. It is the highest city square and rooftop square in the Netherlands, and rises to a height of up to 92 feet (28 meters) above the water level.
OBA Oosterdok - Public Library We walked from NEMO Science Nuseum to Hotel Jakarta to check out their tropical lobby design I heard about ages ago; and from there we walked to Amsterdam's Central Library. Because I love a library! A lot of major cities have very cool Central Libraries, and Amsterdam's is nice—and pretty reflective of the city's density—but not quite as special as those in some other cities I've been to. As you can see, it does have a fairly distinctive exterior architectural design, though. The same could be said of its interior, mind you; it's actually very nice and I'm glad I visited it. I just wasn't quite as wowed by it as I have been by some other central public libraries. (I should probably note, though, that this is apparently the second-largest public library in Europe, in terms of total square footage, behind only the Library of Birmingham.)
Mokumboot Canal Tour Okay well, I did get a recommendation for a more expensive canal boat tour, which I genuinely trust was well worthwhile, but—we're still cheap, and we wanted to milk those IAmstardam City Cards for all they were worth! There's a ton of canal boat tour companies, as you can imagine, most of which launch from the body of water just south of Centraal Station (the same water the bike garage is built under; it's apparently neither a river nor a canal, but formed via late 19th-century land reclamation in the IJ River, which itself used to be a sea arm). So, while Shobhit and I were stopped in the Doubletree Hotel lobby restaurant for some Friets, I used the wifi (tons of places here have wifi; we have not needed to activate our phones for international service) to look up the TripAdvisor rating among the several boat tours that are covered by the City Card. The winner was called Mokumboot, and at first there was some real confusion as to where we were supposed to go to board, because the dock our directions took us to had no boats by that name, only several others. We learned later that they have just the one boat, and launch every 90 minutes or so. We even went all the way inside Centraal Station to ask at the AMsterdam store in there before we figured this out. Once there were just a half hour or so until the next scheduled tour, at 6:30, we rushed back to the same dock. There we found that if you don't have a booked ticket already, they only accept IAmsterdam City Card users if there are spaces available. The guy taking tickets and who also drove the boat, who was 6'4" and could barely avoid having to duck under some of the bridges, told us the capacity was 35 at the most, and Shobhit and I were among the only three City Card riders who fit on in the end. So the boat was quite crowded, but still workable, and we did learn a lot of stuff about the city from the tour guides (the boat driver, and also a young woman who was also blonde—I've never been anywhere there were so many blonde people). Anyway! The above shot is of the so-called "Dancing Houses," apparently one of the more popular postcard picture opportunities in Amsterdam, because they are all crooked, due not only to slightly sinking into the ground, but apparently several other reasons as well, including deliberate architectural design. Once the canal tour was done, we walked briefly to W Lounge—yet another rooftop bar, this one on the 6th floor—before heading back to our hotel, after another long day of sightseeing.
Wednesday, July 29 Rembrandt House Museum On the third and final day of our IAmsterdam City Card use, we did far less, but still managed two museums that accepted the card. The first was the Rembrandt House Museum, which was about six blocks from our first hotel, and was far more fascinating than I anticipated—and I still expected to be very interested. The house is full of nearly all paintings only by his many pupils and contemporaries, but includes two of his own originals, including this kind of wild example above, which is only the small surviving portion of a much larger original painting that was damaged in a fire in 1723, sixty-seven years after it was painted. The original painting was a recreation of an anatomy lesson Rembrandt sat in on with people surrounding a corpse, with its scalp split open to reveal what the brain looks like inside. Now there is some artistic dedication I would never have.
Museum of the Canals Last stop on the IAmsterdam City Card tour! And the eighth such stop overall—not even including in-city public transport (Metro/subway, trams, and buses we never took because trains and trams were more than sufficient) that we had unlimited access to for the three days (more specifically, 72 hours) we could use the City Cards. The Museum of the Canals was arguably the most touristy thing we did, with multimedia presentations in several rooms we moved through with timed presentations in each. We still learned interesting things about the canals that we wouldn not have learned otherwise, such as the fact that all the houses along the canals stand atop millions of wood pilings, due to the land having been waterlogged, swampy wetland. In the above shot, you see Shobhit standing in a scale replica of one of the canals, which average a depth of about 2.6 meters (about 8.5 feet).
De Oeverlanden Check it out—in De Oeverlanden Park, an officially designated public outdoor gay cruising area, complete with municipal signage. The only one in the world! I have to admire the straightforward simplicity: just a rainbow flag, and the Dutch word for cruising area. These signs are posted in basically every trail entrance to the designated area of the park, which is near the south end of Amsterdam's city limits, only about four miles (6.7 km) from Amsterdam Schipol Airport. Mind you, this has not been historically without controversy, even in Amsterdam. De Oeverlanden is also a nature reserve, and in 2004 the city introduced a herd of Scottish Highland cows in a "thinly veiled" effort to discourage cruising. Maybe they thought the gays would be too self-conscious with cows watching them? Whatever, it didn't work, and the posted signage was installed in 2009, apparently with some updates in 2022. The cows are still there though; we actually saw one just outside the designated cruising area, before we knew anything about the cows' backstory, or that there were cows there at all, so it was a bit startling to run into. (Kind of hilariously, Shobhit totally thought it was a buffalo, and I actually wasn't sure what it was. A nearby local clarified for us.) Apparently, there is a new development plan, with an aim for completion by 2040, which will lessen the area and slightly shift its location. Fascinatingly, queer activists are unhappy about this—it seems some people regard this as "historically significant" (something the plan itself apparently acknowledges) and—I'm paraphrasing here—they don't want that history erased. It's perhaps worth noting, though, that the city's official web page for De Oeverlanden does not mention the cruising area among the park's many amenities—although a separate page about its development does.
Homomomument Well hey, as long as we're talking about queer history! We did go out of our way to find Amsterdam's Homomonument, a city monument opened in 1987 as the world's first memorial to people who have been persecuted for their sexual orientation. Back when Elin still worked at PCC, she took her own trip to Amsterdam roughly a decade ago, and sent me a photo of this at the time—it also clearly showed the sign that reads HOMOMONUMENT, which you can see in the photo above if you look closely to the right. I naively thought it was some kind of joke at the time, but it is very much not, and I think it's great that it exists. [posted 12:07am]