TR: Amsterdamned and beyond. A bit of a tribute, and a bit of a challenge..
 

Three nights in Amsterdam. Doing the touristy stuff. Rembrandt and canal boats. Mostly.

The bonus challenge: Visit the Red Light District. Inhale in Vondel park. Eat frikandel at FEBO.

The real challenge: Find acceptable accomodation in Amsterdam-Centrum that costs less than the penthouse suite on Times Square and offers more luxury than the youth hostel in Tirana.

Location, location, location

We failed on challenge number one and stayed in Haarlem instead. Good choice.
€120 per night for the Staats boutique hotel. Which is convinientely located halfway between Haarlem train station and Haarlem historic city center - five minutes walking either way.
While usually the "boutique" means that you get a mediocre room with an oversized interior decorating item of questionable taste, this hotel is really something. With a chicken coop in the backyard. And free (real) coffee and cookies. Nice place, really.
NB: If your mobility status is even remotely in the vicinity of "reduced" or "impaired" make sure that you get a room on the first (US) or ground (UK) floor. Otherwise you will die climbing the stairs. It's unbelievable how in former times the architects of this stately old mansion decided to put in something that resembles more a ladder than stairs. Anyway, our (nice) room was on the third (US) and top floor which makes me wonder in retrospect why I did not die on those stairs.

Getting around:

We got the Amsterdam and region travel pass for 3 days which covered all our travel needs. You can get the pass online. Well, not really - you get a voucher which you must exchange for the real thing at the train station or other outlets mentioned on the website. I think you get a discount of 2 euros or so when you buy online. But you can buy it also when you get there, e.g. at Schipol train station.

The sound of Holland: With travel passes or any other transport ticket you must "check in" when you board any train, bus or tram. And you must "check out" when you disembark. Both is done by holding your card against card readers at the doors, which make a "beep" to acknowledge the check in or check out procedure. I'm sure that most Dutch won't even notice anymore, but I've never ever heard that many "beep" sounds in my whole life than during those 3 1/2 days. You hear so many recorded messages on public transport reminding to not forget to check out when you get off that we did not even tried to imagine what would be the penalty if someone forgot to do that.


General observations

NL is a super card-friendly destination. I arrived with €25 in cash, and left with €15 in cash - but only because I had not noticed the card readers in two places before I made the payments with of €5 each in cash.
In addition, we had been in several establishments which accepted only cards, and no cash at all.
I doubt that many card readers would have been able to do swipe and sign.
We have a (European) chip and PIN with NFC debit and credit card. I made most of my payments with the phone/ Apple Pay. My credit card's NFC and the phone worked all the time except once where only my friend's debit card did the job. The one and only time we encountered a "cash only" situation was at a food cart in Vondel park.
Except for this oddity the summary is: You do not need cash in Amsterdam.

I think it has been written a zillion times, but you get along in Amsterdam and beyond in English very well. I think that every menu in any cafe, eatery or restaurant had always been available in English, too. OTOH, Dutch is halfway between English and German, and a few phrases are easily learned. I speak quite okay basic Dutch and I like to use my trips to the Netherlands to practice, but I cannot remember one moment when it would have been really necessary.


Arrival day:

Eventless short hop from Berlin to Amsterdam with KLM.
First rows in economy on KLM European flights have massive legroom for a small surcharge (€14 if you buy when you book, €10 when you wait until check-in opens 30hrs before departure).
Schipol to Haarlem with bus 300. Every 6 or 8 minutes. Costs €6.50 per person. No cash, a.u.b.


Our hotel had the room ready when we checked in. So we just left our bags and hit town.

Pal would be proud.

Melnq8 Thanks. Very kind of you.

Haarlem

We did not have much planned aside from wandering around than visiting the Great or St Bevo church on our arrival day.
The church is definitely worth a visit - with a special note regarding the impressive organ. Mozart played on it, by the way.
Since we did not have much to eat except for that tiny cheese sandwich on the flight, we walked over to Botermarkt to have a plate of bitter garnituur in one of the cafes. The most famous item of the garnituur is probably the bitterballen itself, more or less related to the Spanish croquetas de jamón.
Anyway, you have not been in the Netherland unless you tried bitterballen. It's great stuff. Like anything the Dutch throw in the frituur to fry. Which is - more or less - anything. But since I have not spotted one overweight Dutch person in three days, it must be good for you.

The rest of the afternoon, we just wandered aimlessly around in Haarlem which is full of nooks and crannies, courtyards, the nice Adriaan windmill and lots of details to admire on the historic buildings.
Since we had been the only tourists - it felt at least that way - it was really easy to enjoy the city.

In the evening, we had a quick dinner at SLA, which serves, not that much surprisingly, salads. Sla means salad in Dutch. Probably one of the fewer places where you had a wider choice of vegetarian or vegan food. Actually, I'm neither vegetarian or vegan but living in Berlin which is totally nuts about vegan, I've become so used to all eateries offering vegan dishes I was surprised that this is still not that much of a fashion in Holland.

We did not have time for it, but if you do, you could pay the Frans Hals museum a visit when in Haarlem.

End of the epilogue.
Tomorrow off to Amsterdamned.
With one shocking revelation to come. Or two, to be precise.

He would be!

Teyler's Museum: the most beautiful museum in all of the Netherlands.

https://www.teylersmuseum.nl/nl

Dank u very much for the trip report, as Pal would say ;).

Be careful with Dutch and German - some words are the said or look the same but have different meanings.
I normally never have small change on me, though I keep a couple of notes about my person for if there is a failure of the payment system (has been known), much to the disappointment of all the charity collectors who ome to our door.
If you don't check out when you leave and have a normal OV pass, not a tourist pass, you get charged the maximum amount and have to try and claim it back online. Also you have to be careful when checking in at train stations to use the gates for the train company you will be using, or you will check in, but with the wrong company, which means a fine on one and a huge fee on the other.

Looking forward more.

Nice report. I agree that Dutch is something of a crossbreed of English and German, but with a lot of pitfalls. I manage when I'm there and like to try the language, but it's not all that easy, and yes, everyone speaks English, god bless them!

I have to quibble about bitterballen, though. Ick. My go-to meal in the Netherlands is pea soup. But one doesn't go to the Netherlands to eat well, IMO.

You can eat extremely well in the Netherlands but snacks like bitterballen and frikandellen are just that, snacks.

I guess you've never eaten where I usually eat then.

or pea soup for that matter.

Hm. :)

I probably have never eaten where you do, menachem, for sure. And frankly, although I love good food I can tolerate a country that doesn't have fabulous food - there are many other things I look forward to when traveling. But I do maintain that, among the various countries of Europe to choose from, no one is ever going to yammer about how good Dutch food is, eh?

Thanks for the comments.
I must admit that we often end up eating street food or snack food - mostly the respective local variation.
And mostly because we did not time our activitities well enough for proper lunch at a real restaurant. Or over-eat on the local snacks before dinner, so we'd ruin the appetite for a decent meal.

Amsterdam

I don't think anyone needs any extra information on canal cruises or the Rijksmuseum, so I probably focus more on the rest, mundane or midly irrelevant observations.

The trains from Haarlem to Amsterdam CS run frequentely like elsewhere the metro. We usually made it to the station around 9 or 9:30, so I guess most of the morning commute was already gone. Quick and easy trip to Amsterdam main station.
Transport Nerd Info: Haarlem station is a quite unique construction. You can still find the historic waiting rooms and it looks as if the structures on the platforms had been built before they but the big roof on it. A bit hard to explain. And there are two big murals in the Eastern entrance.

Arriving in Amsterdam, we were surprised that not many tourists had arrived (mid week in mid September). There were no crowds at the piers of the canal boats. So we thought to jump on the next one, and get this off the list. While some may say that this is just such a lame, old way for sightseeing, it has the undoubtable advantage that the canal boat is the only way to explore Amsterdam without getting run over by cyclists.

Walking around in central Amsterdam.. to understand getting around in Amsterdam, you have to understand that there are three castes when it comes to traffic.

The ruling caste are the cyclists. Like Maya priests they are exempt from rules and regulations which govern the lives of normal people. There are specially designed cycle lanes which you must not use as a pedestrian, and there are pedestrian zones where bikes are usually allowed to go. In some parks you find paths where there are no bicycles allowed which means that slightly less cyclists will run you over than in the other areas.
It's not that they would carefully plan to kill pedestrians - they simple cannot take notice of such creatures. Just like you won't even notice when you step on a mosquito. Where other religions favor houses of worship, the cyclistas erect places of worship in public spaces all over town, where thousands and thousands of bicycles are left in huge numbers to enhance the natural beauty of the cityscape. For some unenlightened foreign souls these congregations of rubber tires and steel frames may look like junk yards, but you know better.

The second caste are cars and small trucks. Against common believe, it's absolutely easy to drive around in the historic center. There are just very few cyclists-and-pedestrian only streets. The surprisingly high number of vacant parking spaces was easily explained when I check the ticket machine: one hour roadside (or rather: canalside) parking costs whopping € 7.50.

Eventually, the least relevant caste in Amsterdam are pedestrians. Which also makes it very easy to distinguish visitors from locals. Locals are always on a bicycle. The typical streets on each side of the canals feature: one lane for parking parallel to the edge of the canal, a single lane for bicycles, cars and trucks. And, along the facades of the houses, something that could be mistaken for a sidewalk. But this slightly elevated, maybe one meter wide part of the street is mostly used to display items for exterior decorating, like oversized potted plants or benches or anything that is suitable to block the passage of the pedestrian and, of course, to park bicycles.

After this short intermission, back to the agenda.
Having finished the canal cruise, we were looking for something to eat. When the boat had been going on the IJ for a while, we had noticed a pancake restaurant near the ferry pier, on the riverside of the central station.
This was really a neat place. The food itself comes from that Pancake chain that has several locations in town. But if you can score a table on the water you have a nice view on the river, the passing ships and the ferries coming and going every other minute.
By the way, to get "through" the station to the other side, you can use the main entrance with ticket barriers if you have day or multi day pass. Just check in, walk through, check out on the other side. Otherwise you have "passages" also signposted as such like "IJ passage" to avoid the ticket barriers. Or a big underpass on the left side at the edge of the station.

I have to look up what we did afterwards - and just noticed that I am running late for dinner.. so, tot ziens for now.

Loving this, Cowboy1968. Amsterdamned bodes. Thanks for the museum info, menachem.

Nice report, Cowboy; I'm looking forward to more.

Yes, and that's a mistake. All YT videos about "Amsterdam street food", or "Dutch cuisine" mainly copy each other in their love for bitterballen and pancakes. Dutch people eat out too, you know. You think we tolerate bad food better?

I need counseling, then, menachem. I go to the Netherlands with some frequency, but never with a goal of eating well. I do love a good rijsttafel, but also understand that that's not Dutch food. I don't watch YouTube to get my take on Dutch or any other food. But please do tell, what are great Dutch dishes?

At this point, I usually say: remember, we're a nation of traders. And Eurasian food is of course very Dutch, part of our cultural heritage, even if that heritage is not a very happy or uncontroversial one.

For Dutch dishes, you'll need to eat at someone's home.

For great food, from all quarters of the earth, consult the Fork. But please, don't stay stuck in the "Dutch food = pea soup and bitterballen" myth.

There are some excellent restaurants in the Netherlands. By Italian standards, they tend to be expensive. Ask Menachem; he can set you straight.

By the way, Menachem, I've been procrastinating about the trip report for the trip we took in June, for which your help was invaluable.