Visiting Amsterdam, Netherlands – Part One

Last updated on 24 April 2025

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How I ended up on a trip to Amsterdam, Netherlands

If you don’t follow me on Twitter or Instagram, then you may not know that last Friday and Saturday I was in Amsterdam! My dad had to go for a work conference, which took place on the Saturday, so I went along, just because I could, really. We got an early flight on Friday morning (had to get up at 5am!), so we had the whole afternoon in the city, wandering around.

We stayed in The Shelter, a Christian hostel in the heart of the city. It was really awesome. We stayed in a room with 3 other people (obviously a girl room and a boy room), and had a free breakfast in the morning. The girls’ rooms had bathrooms as well, and there was free Wi-Fi, so really, it was amazing. I highly recommend it if you are travelling to Amsterdam and need a place to stay. Everyone is super duper friendly and are willing to help out and give you tips about the city. On Saturday morning, I went on a walking tour that they were running, around the city pointing out some cool and interesting things. But that’s for another post.

Back to Friday. Once we found the hostel, we took a map and wandered through the city to find the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum. Dad had already been to the Van Gogh museum in 2005, so we went to the Rijkesmuseum instead. But first, a few pics of walking to the museum…

On the way there we walked through a flower market, which was really pretty. I would have taken better pictures, but there was a sign that said no photography in shop, so I got scared off by that and had to take sneaky pictures by just clicking and not looking. Back to the museum…:

It had recently been reopened, after having some reconstruction and redesign work, so it was really big and white and shiny. It was mostly paintings, well, the parts that we saw, and I’m not really in to paintings much. Sure there are some nice ones, but the majority of paintings I’m just like ‘meh. Seen it, let’s move on’. Never go to a museum or an art gallery with me – I will make my way around the room at a moderate pace, but I never stop and read or look too closely at things, not unless something catches my eye. Even so, it was cool to see some real Rembrandt paintings, and a couple of Van Gogh’s.

I actually really like sculptures though, perhaps it’s because they are 3D or shiny and smooth…I don’t know. But this one was my favourite in the entire museum. I think it’s called something like ‘Two Mothers’, and don’t know if you can see, but there is the mother and child, and then at her feet there is a dog, and then the lady is holding cloth thing with puppies in it. I like it.

After walking around the museum for a while, we wandered outside again and took a look around the garden, where they had Henry Moore sculptures. We didn’t end up going to the Van Gogh museum, because it was getting a bit late, but that was fine because Dad had already been there, and there were some in the Rijksmuseum, so it was all good.