Tuesday, July 2, 2019: My flight from Detroit to Amsterdam left at 10:47pm. Wednesday, July 3, 2019: Took the bus from Schiphol airport to Leidsplein. From there my hostel was 500 yards away. I dropped my stuff off just before 3 pm local time and began to walk on Leidsegracht and then on various streets. I ate a recipe containing brown rice from a place called “Wok to Walk”. I ate that same thing 3 more times in Amsterdam, I had Chicken and yellow rice in an argentine restaurant called “La Estancia” on Reguliersdwarsstraat 86, in Amsterdam, and I had fried rice with chicken once at a Chinese restaurant in Antwerp. The rest of my food, I bought from grocery stores.
July 4, 2019: Went to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. The place has nicely been turned into a museum. The rooms Anne Frank and 7 others hid in were behind the building her father had had a business selling spices and pickle and jelly making supplies. You enter through modern glass doors where the business or an adjacent building was. They have a coat check desk. The original furniture or replicas is not present, as her father wanted the museum to look. I don’t think this is the most important holocaust or nazi era genocide related site. For that you will need to go to the remains of a concentration or death camp or maybe the site of a mass shooting. After the Anne Frank house I went to the Portuguese synagogue. The Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam was completed in 1675. The sanctuary has never been updated with electricity or heating. The rooms surrounding the sanctuary building, containing offices, a smaller chapel, and storage rooms, have been subtly been updated with heat and electricity. Every Friday and/or when they have classical chamber music concerts in the sanctuary, the room is illuminated by hundreds of candles.
Then I went to the Jewish museum. After the Jewish museum I ate the stir fry recipe with brown rice. Then I went to the royal palace. I showed up at 4pm and I wish I had shown up at 3:45 or 3:30. The palace closes at 5pm. I had the audio guide. Then I went bodies world just because it was there and all the highbrow normal museums - except for the major art museums, but I had tickets to 2 of them for the next day - closed at 5pm. Bodies world had a blood pressure cuff – I tried it and took it off when it got too tight and the number read “200” and I suspect my blood pressure is too high and I don’t know what to do about it yet.
On Friday, July 5th, I went to the Reijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum. The Reijksmuseum is an art museum not bigger than the Detroit Institute of Art; a large percent of the place (half to 2/3?) is old Dutch paintings; The other works include models of ships, old firearms, old Delftware porcelain, an Asian wing I missed, a floor for modern works I missed, few old musical instruments, other random sculpture and silver objects, and so on.
I am not necessarily a fan of Van Gogh and blurry impressionist paintings and I went to the Van Gogh museum just to say I saw it. There was one Van Gogh land scape painting that seemed to take place in the late evening, in stormy weather and part of the clouds vaguely resembled fists. That is not the official description. It is just my personal judgment.
I had bought tickets for both places in advance. Tickets for the Van Gogh have a given time. You can’t enter sooner than 15 minutes in advance. You can’t get in without already having a ticket in hand when you arrive. The Reijksmuseum tickets have no given entrance time. You could buy them at the last minute but the guidebooks strongly suggest getting them online in advance to avoid extremely long lines. I showed up before 9 am so I would get in when they opened. 20 people were in line in front of me. The place was half or less as crowded as the Uffizi in Florence, Italy.