Amsterdam

I was at the Rijksmuseum for the Night Watch, like almost everybody who books a ticket. That hangs at the far end of the Gallery of Honour, upstairs, and it is where …

A few days earlier I had stood in front of the Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum and admitted that I had never understood it. I knew it was a Rembrandt. That was …

I had seen this painting perhaps four hundred times before I ever saw it. On fridge magnets, on tea towels, on postcards in every souvenir shop between Centraal and the Bloemenmarkt in …

I went up on King’s Day. That is the twenty-seventh of April, the loudest day of the Dutch year, and by early afternoon the canal below the brewery was full of boats …

I had walked through Vondelpark in Amsterdam several times before I ever ate there. In April the pond carries floating beds of tulips, planted on black rafts and set out across the …

I have three of these on a shelf at home. They came from KLM flights, they are filled with Dutch gin, and each one is a scale model of a real building …

I support Mercedes. I mention this because the last stretch of the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam is essentially a shrine to a Red Bull driver, and I walked into it as a …

I studied history. That is most of the explanation for this blog, and it is the whole explanation for why I will happily give an hour to one room in the Rijksmuseum …

I do not drink beer. I have said so in print before now, and it is still true, so the honest place to start is that I booked the Heineken Experience in …

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam takes a few hours to get through, and by the end of mine the paintings had stopped landing. The garden outside fixed that faster than a coffee would …

We went to Flow on the morning after King’s Day. King’s Day falls on 27 April and is the Dutch national holiday for the King’s birthday. The country spends it outdoors and …

People call the Rijksmuseum the Louvre of Amsterdam, and I understand why. Both are national collections in enormous nineteenth-century buildings, both are built around one painting everybody has come to see, and …