In fall 2019, having loved our Viking cruise down the Danube, Sandy and I took another Viking trip, down the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basel. It was even better than the Danube trip: we were joined by our good friends Andy and Char, and the scenery, ports, food, and wine rocked!.
Amsterdam, Oct. 10-12: Before the trip, we spent three delightful days wandering around Amsterdam from our base in the modern, Asian-themed Hotel Okura.
Here are the ABCs of Amsterdam, emphasizing food and drink to a rather embarrassing extent.
A: Appetite, architecture, and affordability. As for appetite, Amsterdam is a fabulous city for eating. It’s swimming in ethnic restaurants, herring kiosks, bakeries (see B below), and cheese shpps (see C below). The architecture features brick, gabled, and often flower-bedecked buildings, many of which date back to the 17th century. Many houses are little more than one room wide because taxes were assessed based on the dwelling’s width. Those lining the canals frequently tilt because the subsurface is so soft. Remarkably for a Western European city, most things in Amsterdam are priced affordably. Sandy and I enjoyed a seafood dinner for two, with wine/beer, taxes and tips, for $57. Even items like Delftware aren’t shockingly expensive.
B: Bagels, bakeries, beer, and bicycles. There are bagel stores everywhere, and the bagels actually are decent. Bakeries abound, with the heady aroma of breads, macarons, stroopwafels (thin waffle sandwiches filled with caramel), and cookies vying with a certain other heady aroma mentioned under C, below. Of course, all the food must be washed down with something, and there are a host of small and medium-sized breweries making craft beers (mostly pilsners and wheat beers) that compete favorably with the 800-pound gorilla that is Heineken. As for bicycles, there are something like 1.3 per resident. Woe to the pedestrian who doesn’t constantly survey through 360 degrees before stepping onto a sidewalk or crossing a street.
C: Cafes, coffee shops, and cheese. You’ll find sporadic Starbucks in Amsterdam, but it’s well worth patronizing one of the local cafes, which make delicious, strong brews. In coffee shops – not to be confused with cafes – coffee is available but the main draw is the weed. Then again, there’s no need to read the sign above the door; a coffee shop is olfactorily distinguishable from a café from quite a distance. On to the cheese: for good reason, the Dutch cherish their cheese (it’s gouda and you’ll want to edam a lot of it (sorry)), and there are cheese shops all over Amsterdam. One final C: charm, which pervades every canal-filled vista and rowhouse-lined alley.
Kinderdijk: If the Eskimos really have dozens of words for “snow,” the Dutch must have at least as many for “flat.” We biked this morning through a UNESCO World Heritage Site featuring windmills built in 1740, and the land has nary a ripple, bump, or undulation. What it does have, though, is nearly two dozen, centuries-old windmills and their mirror-image reflections, as well as lots of livestock and waterfowl. Shamelessly picturesque!
PuffinlessTravel 