Canals, Museums, Trolleys, Hotels, Bridges, Stations, Squares, History,, Meals, Restaurants, Sandwich Shops, Snacks.
To begin with, the restaurants deal in the most exotic cuisine Europe. There’s a glut of cafes and restaurants near Dam Square, round the red-light district and Leidseplein: Dutch, Chinese, Italian and Indonesian. There are, for instance, Indonesian restaurants here, by the dozen, where you’ll see residents at work on a 20-dish dinner called “rijsttafel”;…
There are few other places in the world that have been so involved in international trade and communications for as long as Amsterdam has. In its golden age Amsterdam was the prototypical model of the world city of mercantile capitalism and it has survived various phases of formation and reformation to remain among the higher…
In traversing this area, be sure to make use of the fabulous trolleys of Amsterdam, which race through the town at surprisingly short intervals, and cost very little to use. The Amsterdam streetcars are modern vehicles, each consisting of two connected cars which you enter at the back. They are virtually soundless in their operation,…
It is a feeling we have all shared when the excitement of an impending holiday rapidly diminishes as you realise that early flight will have you clawing for the alarm clock in the middle of the night. It is also a feeling all too common for business travellers who, in order to make that 9am…
The city of Amsterdam is an inverted forest. Its pine trees do not rise from the ground, they bore into it, crown downward. The terrain is so soggy that each house must be built on a solid foundation of piles driven into the mud. The Hollander has a strange name for these subterranean trees; he…
Here we are in Amsterdam at the fag-end, if that’s the right expression, of International Fashion Week. “Spectators will be blown away by the originality and flare of some of Holland’s finest designers,” says the publicity blurb. “Cutting-edge fashion at its best.” The only word I recognise there is “flare” – several pairs of these…
Amsterdam, in its physical aspect, is almost entirely a product of the so-called “Golden Age” of the Netherlands-that period in the 17th century when Holland surged to the near-pinnacle of world power, after its victory over Spain in the brutal Eighty Years War. It was during this period that the merchants of Amsterdam-then the dominant…