First up, congrats to Netti whose name I drew at random to win my Amsterdam giveaway from last week.  Netti, I sent you an email so check your in box if you haven’t seen it yet!

The first six days of our recent trip to Europe were spent in Amsterdam.

At first it might seem like six days is a lot for one smaller-ish city, but we (my husband, sister and niece) all wish we’d had even more time there.  There is so much to see in Amsterdam, not to mention the surrounding areas that are easy to reach by train.

First of all, some online sources say Amsterdam has over 100 museums!  Can you imagine?

  Now, granted, some of them are quite small, like the Tulip Museum (I’ll share more about that one in a Sunday morning garden post).

And some of them are quite … well … let’s just call them quirky.  Like the Cat Cabinet Museum, or the Museum of Bags and Purses.  Then there are the marijuana museums, and sex museums that people seem to expect from Amsterdam (sorry, we didn’t check out any of those).

And of course, some of their museums are world renowned, like the Van Gogh Museum, the National Maritime Museum and the Rijksmuseum.

I’ll share more on that one later too.

We also visited the Rembrandthuis Museum.

Rembrandt lived in this house in the 1600’s for about 19 years.  At the age of 52 he had amassed so much debt that he had to sell off the house and its contents to pay his creditors.  That actually ended up being fortuitous for the future curators of his museum because there was an inventory made of all of his belongings for the sale.  Thus it was possible to recreate the interiors of the home with amazing detail.

But in addition to museums, Amsterdam is just a very charming place to wander around in with all of its canals, bridges, and narrow gabled canal houses.

Although nothing is more than about an hour away on foot max, the public transportation system is super easy to use as well.  All you need is a credit card with a chip.  You tap as you get on a tram, and then you have to be sure to also tap on your way out (that’s how they know how long of a trip to charge you for).  Most of our tram journeys cost around $3.

On our first day in Amsterdam, we ended up stumbling into one of the traditional Dutch pubs, known as a bruin café or a brown bar.

Please forgive Kris and Debbie if they look a bit worn out.  We’d been on an overnight flight and none of us got much sleep.  Plus it was over 80° in Amsterdam that day (which is totally unusual for them in September), so we were both hot and tired.

This was clearly a spot normally favored by locals and it was the one instance during our entire trip where people tried to speak to us in Dutch.  We later found out that brown bars tend to be local watering holes, sort of the Dutch version of an English pub.

While in a brown bar, you have to order some of the brown food to get the full experience.  We tried the bitterballen, which are basically a meat and gravy sort of mixture that is rolled into balls, then battered and deep fried.

I thought they were delicious.

We also tried the ham and cheese kroketten, which was also good.

Speaking of stumbling across something unintentionally, that’s also how we ended up in the red light district.  We were trying to make our way across town on foot and the route took us down this alleyway.

I didn’t quite notice the red lanterns at first and it was a little startling to realize there were scantily clad ladies about 2′ away from me behind all of those windows.  Awkward.

Over the coming weeks I’ll share more about some of the side trips we took outside of Amsterdam itself, as well as the 2nd half of our trip which was spent on a cruise around Norway.  So be sure to stay tuned for that.

If any of you are looking for a city to visit in Europe that is super easy to navigate, where nearly everyone speaks English, and you can use your credit card for pretty much everything (in fact I saw more places that didn’t accept cash, rather than the other way around), Amsterdam just might be the perfect spot for your next getaway!

Have any of you been to Amsterdam?  And if so, what was your favorite thing to do there?  And if not, what are you waiting for?