Amsterdam is the Netherlands’ capital, it is also the country’s largest city and the most visited. The city is known for its tolerant character, tulips, bycicles, canals, aquitecture and much more. We stayed in Amsterdam for 4 days on the first week of August and we fell in love with this city straight away! The inspirational museums, delightful restaurants, colourful canals, warm streets… There’s never a shortage of things to do in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam is well known for its beautiful Canals. We choose to explore them by foot, but there are other ways like on a boat or join the locals and hop on a bike. Walking through the canals gave us the change to enjoy them slowly and pay attention to all the details. From the busy mornings, with everyone rushing to get the day started, to the relaxing afternoons, our favorite part, where everyone gets to enjoy a warm sunset. The coffee shop terraces are full, you can see locals on boats enjoying a bottle of wine, or people just siting on the canals walls.
In a city with loads of canals, bridges have an important roll. You should definitely pay attention to them. You will find many diferente kinds of bridges, all of them with their own beauty.
With over 30 parks to choose from, Vondelpark is the largest and has been awarded with a national heritage status. It’s the perfect place for picnic and relaxe under the big trees afterwards. We went there a couple of times at lunch time and it was the perfect place to recharge our energies. If you walk around the park you can also find some restaurants and an outdoor theatre with live concerts in summer.
Close to Vondelpark, Museumplein is the cultural center of Amsterdam. Unfortunately we didn’t had that much time to spend in there, but if you do, there you can find the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art. They all seem very interesting to us, so if you have the opportunity check them out let us know if our thoughts are correct.
In between these magnificent buildings you can find a green open square perfect to relax and located at the back of the Rijksmuseum you can find the I amsterdam letters, it is the largest one on the city and a photo Icon.
Not far from Museumplein you can find FOAM Museum, if you enjoy photography as much as we do you need to pay them a visit. We did and we don’t regret it.
And if it’s flowers that rock your boat head off to Bloemenmarkt. Its a floating flower market with colourful flower stalls, a remainder from when flowers arrived in Amsterdam from the countryside by boat. There you can find not only tulips, but all kind of flowers, house plants, seeds and gardening essentials. We bought tulip bulbs to plant on our backyard, since then every spring we remember our trip to Amsterdam. It’s the best souvenir that we could’ve hoped for!
To enjoy nice panoramic views of the city we found Nemo (no, we are not talking about the cute orange fish, but the Science Museum) and the Amsterdam Public Library. These two buildings not only have a fantastic architecture, but they rooftops offering spectacular views over the city.
While we where there a local told us about the ferry services on the IJ river which connect the city center to Amsterdam Noord (North). The ferries are free and they can take foot passengers, as well as cyclists and moped users. They operate from outside the central station and they gave us a change to explore the EyeFilm (Dutch Film Museum) and NDSM wharf (a very cool industrial area that is gradually transforming into a hot spot for local festivals and fresh startups). One of the ferry stations was close to an old abandoned submarine. How cool is that?
To finish this blog about Amsterdam off course that we need to talk about FOOD! There are so many coffee shops and restaurants, some of them with beutiful terraces and stunning decor.
One of our favorites was Moeders Restaurante, known for the traditional Dutch food as well as for its Mothers Wall of Fame. In this restaurant all mothers are heroes. Clients are invited to bring a picture of they mothers and they put it on the wall. Was a shame that we didn’t had our mum’s pictures with us. Also, no two plates are alike.
Other one that we can recommend its the Upstairs Pancakes. To get there you need to climb a very steep staircase and when you reach the restaurant on the second floor you can find more then 100 teapots hanging from the ceiling, the walls are covered with many portraits of the Dutch Royal Family and old paintings of Amsterdam. Its a supper cute restaurant with delicious pancakes. Be sure to book it in advance. We didn’t and we were extremely lucky as someone didn’t show up. But if you don’t wanna risk it, book it!
As we said at the beginning, we loved Amsterdam. It’s on our top of favourite cities in Europe and we actually came back with the feeling that Amsterdam could be home.
We hope that this blog post has been useful and, most of all, have inspired you to visit Amsterdam.
See you soon!
