Most of my long trips begin with a red-eye out of Montreal, and a fair number of those red-eyes put me down at Schiphol with hours to spend before the next leg. …
Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, at the base of the CN Tower in Toronto, is a lot of fun, and the Dangerous Lagoon is the best of it. It is the aquarium’s largest …
I am usually disappointed by airport food, and by airport coffee even more. So Café Flor, on Schiphol’s D pier, was a surprise. We stopped there in May while we waited to …
I have written about the Moco Museum in Amsterdam more than any other building. The Banksys, the Basquiat room, the immersive floors, the garden. What I had never written about is the …
Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat in De Pijp has now fed me breakfast three times, at three different places, and I am beginning to think the street should be on the tourist map …
This is the boat. Cream hull, varnished timber window frames, lifebuoys strapped to the canopy, a Dutch flag at the bow, and along the side the registration and the capacity: twenty passengers. …
There is only one surviving portrait photograph of Vincent van Gogh. It was taken in January 1873, when he was nineteen, before he had painted anything at all. A second photograph, long …
I came up from the lake still looking for the orchids. The Wilhelmina Pavilion had turned out to be a shop, somewhere to eat and the toilets, with no floral display in …
I went in expecting a tourist trap. A restaurant inside one of the busiest museums in Europe, named after the painter, with a captive audience of two million people a year who …
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 came out of the Willem-Alexander Pavilion with a vague piece of information and no map sense whatsoever. Somebody had mentioned an orchid exhibition. I had no idea where it was, so …
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 …
