More than just the red light district

Just a bit of geography about the layout of Amsterdam to try and make it easier for those of you who haven’t been here. It’s shaped like a big U with the harbour and the central station at the top of the U and the hostel and the museums at the bottom of the U. It’s about 3km from the top to the bottom of this section of town and it covers most of the places that tourists are likely to want to see. So after I arrived, I headed out (after having put on my raincoat and hat because it was freezing cold and raining) and walked pretty much through the centre of town to the hostel which is on the edge of Vondelpark. I had decided to stay at the Stayokay again as I know they are clean and they usually don’t have dodgy people staying in them. There seem to be a lot of people in Amsterdam given that its population is less than 1 million. There can’t possibly be that many tourist here at this time of the year especially on a Monday.

I had to put my bags in a locker in the hostel as checkin isn’t until after 3pm but at least they had somewhere secure to dump all my stuff (even if it did cost me 4 euros). I then headed off to find somewhere to have some lunch before I went for a wander. Unfortunately the really good sounding place that I had wanted to go to isn’t there any longer (so I suspect can’t have been that good or have moved somewhere else) and I couldn’t see anything else around the area that looked good so I decided to just keep on moving and find something later. I stopped first in the Dam Square which is where the original dam across the Amstel river was put and which gave the city its name. It’s hard to picture now because the river has been paved over so there isn’t any water in sight. It’s home to some of the important buildings though. On one side you have the Palace which was originally built as the new town hall but was converted to a palace when the French took over in the early 19^th century. It was used by the Dutch royals for a while but they live in the Hague now and only use this palace for special functions and visits. You can go and visit it at certain times but I must say the exterior doesn’t really excite enthusiasm about the inside. Opposite the palace is the war memorial which is big and stone and that’s about all I can say about it. It does appear to be weathering quite badly given that it’s only been there 60 years.

The Nieuwekerk is on the edge next to the palace and is actually gothic and not really all that new. It got its name simply because it is newer than the old church. At the moment it is home to part of the Stedelijk museum’s collection of modern art which means that you have to pay to get in and they have filled the central section with walls to hand the art on. Having peeked in the doors, I must say it spoils the interior of the church to have it split up so much and you can’t see the important architectural features all that well. They also want 3.75 on top of the museum card to go in and have a look so I gave it a miss. Next to the church but not on the square is a very fancy department store called Magna Plaza which used to be the Post Office in the 19^th century. It’s made out of multicoloured bricks and is quite funky.

I continued on up the Damrak (which is where the river used to run) past all the cheap hotels that are along the road on the way to the station (and the red light district). On the opposite side of the road are the former and current stock exchange buildings (the current one has the stock prices scrolling on its front). The former building is now the home of the philharmonic (not sure how that renovation works). I turned right after the stock exchange and into the edge of the red light district. I was heading for St Nicholas church and the Oudekerk but managed to get a little lost. The maps of Amsterdam don’t show all the little streets in the red light district or all the names of the streets so it can get a little complicated. I eventually made it to St Nicholas’ by following a canal.

St Nicholas’ was the first post reformation Catholic church in Amsterdam and was built as a new home for the Catholics in the late 19^th century as all their old churches had been taken over by the Protestants. It is absolutely stunning inside with mosaics and marble. No expense was spared that is for sure. It also has a very unusual altar with a big crown over the top of it. St Nicholas is a very popular saint here as he is the patron saint of sailors and no-one wanted to drown. He is also the patron saint of unmarried women which is an unusual combination.

I headed next to the Oude Kerk which is the very middle of the red light district. It’s on a small square which is completely surrounded by brothels and coffee shops. You have to walk past the women sitting semi-naked in the windows to get into the church. It must make for an interesting walk to church on a Sunday morning. But then again, given its position in town, it might have an interesting congregation. Shame it’s not Catholic anymore because that would be a very eye opening confessional.

Climbing the tower of this church is meant to be good but none of the towers in Amsterdam open until the beginning of April and they all close in October. The weather was pretty awful most of the time that I was in town anyway so it probably wasn’t worth it.

The Oude Kerk is still a functioning church on weekends but opens as a museum during the week. It’s 5 euros to get in but is free with the museum card. It is really stunning inside with a barrel ceiling that still has traces of the 15^th century paintings on it. The church was built in the 14^th and 15^th centuries in several stages. They had to keep adding to the plans as the population was growing rapidly and they needed more space. It lost most of its funding when the Nieuwekerk was built in the 15^th century. It was then badly damaged during the Iconoclastic Fury (now that’s a great name for a band) in 1466 and then became a protestant church after the city switched religion. The ceiling paintings were only spared because they were too high up to be painted over.

For a while they didn’t even use the building as a church and it had markets and meetings and people sleep in it. They eventually returned it to its original purpose and in the 18^th century they did paint over the roof paintings and redecorated a lot of the church. They didn’t look after it though and it was almost condemned in the 20^th century.  In the 1970s they did a lot of renovation and it was reopened afterwards.

The entire church floor is made up of graves and this seems to have been popular in the Netherlands. I suppose it is hard to bury people if you hit water every time you dig a hole. There are 2500 that make up the floor in this church and they are all numbered. Some have no decoration other than the name and the date while others are very ornate and have lots of carving. They also buried more than one person in the hole and there are some larger graves containing whole families.

The choir stalls are one of the few items in the church to survive from the catholic times and aren’t in bad condition. They are worth going and having a close look at because they show a series of Dutch sayings. My favourite is the man who is shitting money (the Dutch version of money doesn’t grow on trees). The guide that you are given when you come into the church has most of the carvings described on the back.

From the Oude Kerk, I headed across the Red Light District to the Nieuwmarkt which is where the old weight house is. It’s now a restaurant and they have done a good job of restoring the exterior. I found a supermarket near here and grabbed some stuff for lunch as I hadn’t passed anything that looked any good while walking. The red light district has a lot of cheap, low quality food like pre prepared pizzas and deep fried things (seriously the cholesterol levels in the Netherlands must be extraordinary). So feeling better for some fuel I continued on my walk around the town. I headed next to Rembrandt’s House which is now a museum. He lived in the house and it had his studio for many years until he was declared bankrupt and had to move out. He paid 13000 guilders for it when the average man was making 300 guilders per year. When they sold all his belongings they made a very good inventory of all the items in the house for the auction and it’s from this list and from sketches that he made of the rooms, that they have recreated the house as it would have been during his time.

They have an etcher who does demonstrations in the print room that Rembrandt used of how they used to create the copper plates and then ink and press them. It’s really quite informative and it’s all in English. They run them a few times a day and there is a sign on the door that says when. There were three techniques that Rembrandt used to get the different effects on his print plates and the etcher demonstrated all of them. The most common as it gave the best detail was to etch the plate using acid. You coated the plate with a mixture of pine resin, beeswax and bitumen and then etched the picture into it with a needle. You then dipped the entire plate into acid and where you had scratched the waxy coating away, the acid would eat into the copper and leave grooves. Rembrandt sometimes used to dip the plates twice having added more wax to sections of it to give him two depths of line. He would also use dry point etching and etching with a small chisel like tool to give him different effects. The plates are very delicate and you only get a short print run before the grooves start to wear out and they picture fades. Sometimes the artists or others would redraw the lines over the top to try and get another run out of the plate but it rarely worked well.

The ink was something that they made themselves out of linseed oil that had been cooked so that it wouldn’t go off. It was very thick and sticky, not at all like modern inks but it wouldn’t dry out even if exposed to air for prolonged periods so was worth the effort of making. They used to apply it with large things made out of dog skin. It has to be dog skin because they don’t have pores and there for the ink doesn’t get absorbed by it. The ones they have in the museum are fake and made of some other type of leather because they have absorbed the ink and gone hard. The etcher then shows you how the press works and the special paper that they used which is slightly damp and very soft so that it presses into the grooves better.

I then started through the house which basically goes room by room. You get a free audio guide at the beginning and it tells you where to go next. The front rooms are where Rembrandt used to meet clients and sell art. He was a dealer as well as an artist and the walls of these rooms were covered in paintings and prints that were for sale. There is also a kitchen and a bedroom which have been redecorated in the 17^th century style.

The next floor up has his studio which went across the whole of the front of the house. The shutters are in sections and white cloth hangs above them so that the light coming into the room could be controlled. He used this room for sketching and painting and they have it set up as it was in some of the sketches. They also have an exhibit on how the paints were produced as paint in tubes didn’t turn up until the 19^th century. Behind the studio is a room filled with objects that he had collected for use in his sketches (particularly on historical themes) and for use in training his students. It has busts of emperors, armour, weapons, stuffed animals, shells, books, paintings, all sorts. They know what was in it because of the inventory and they have tried to find all the things.

On the top floor was the students’ studio but they havent’ recreated it. This area is instead used for an exhibition on his prints. The museum owns the largest collection of his prints in the world as well as a few of his paintings. The exhibitions change regularly as they don’t like to expose the prints to light for too long. At the moment it follows his development as an artist and the themes of his work and is very well put together.

 I was really impressed by this museum and would recommend it to everyone even if you aren’t that interested in his art. It was well organised, you got the free audioguide, you could take photos if you wanted to and the staff were really helpful.

I then back tracked up the street to Pintohuis which is an old merchant house which is now a library. It’s only open a few days a week so it’s worth checking out if it’s open. The building doesn’t look like much from the outside but has really nice painted ceilings on the ground floor. It’s fine to just pop in and have a look at them.

I then tried to get to one of the museums that is in a 17^th century house but the entire street in front of it is dug up and closed off while they do something. They seem to do that a bit here in the Netherlands. I’m not sure what the people who live in the street are meant to do for the several months that it seems to take them to do anything.

So I had to walk back around the block and ended up in Rembrandtsplein which doesn’t really have anything going for it so I continued through and into the flower market. This is where you can buy cut flowers, pot plants and bulbs of various sorts. You can also buy marijuana seeds by variety though getting them out of the country could be difficult. By the way, if you see a coffee shop and it has a sign on the door that says you have to be 18 to come in, don’t go there for coffee, that’s not what they are selling. The smell emanating from the door is usually a dead give away.

I was then ready to head back to the hostel but got distracted by the thought of dinner. I headed into De Pijp which is one of the multicultural areas of Amsterdam and had some dinner at a Turkish place next to the market. It’s not a bad suburb and it looks like it’s slowly being gentrified. Then it was back to the hostel to get my bag out of the locker and then to very gratefully find that there is a lift and I didn’t have to walk up three flights of stairs with my bags. And then even better, I got a bottom bed in the bunk so no more climbing on windowsills to get in and out of the bed.

I met one of the other girls in the room and we decided to head out to see Amsterdam at night. Neither of us had been that keen to go by ourselves so it was lucky we met up. Amsterdam at night isn’t all that exciting. I would have expected more lights around the canals but there are really only the ones marking the bridges and that’s it. The only place that is more lit up is the Red Light District but it’s more lit up in a tacky rather than glamorous way. We headed up there though to check it out but I think that you actually see more during the day. Lots of the girls were busy and had their curtains drawn so whole street were pretty quiet. Most of the girls just stand or sit and pout at the men that are walking around (they pretty much ignore women) though there were a couple that were dancing. Some have black lights so that their underwear glows (I guess anything that sets you apart). Interspersed amongst the windows are sex shops, sex shows and fast food joints. The shops sell some interesting items including teddybears with giant penises, garden gnomes with giant penises, giant penises (I suspect that you are seeing a pattern here). They also sold an unusual collection of DVDs many that involved horses. On the way out of the area, we saw a tour going into the backstreets and worryingly they had some kids with them. I would have liked to see those mothers come up with a good explanation of what that woman was doing to the horse. By the time we walked back down to the hostel it was quite late and we both ended up going to bed.

The Red Light District is an interesting place. Prostitution is legal in the Netherlands and the girls (and boys) have their own union and award and things like that. The council is even buying up some of the brothels so that they can control where the profits go. It's still illegal to have a pimp but I'm sure that all those blokes without necks in the street aren't just hanging around for the atmosphere! But if you come to Amsterdam you have to realise that there is more to it than the coffee shops and the red light district (at least if you aren't a Brit on a stag weekend), Amsterdam has a lot of museums and interesting districts that don't involve women in very little clothing and more than enough other things to keep you busy.

The weather wasn’t spectacular on my second day but at least it switched frequently between raining and blowing a gale but mostly not both at the same time. It was meant to get worse during the course of the week so I decided to do some of the more spread out sights. I started with the very ordinary breakfast at the Stayokay. In Amsterdam they seem to have this horrible yoghurt that has the consistency of glue (and forms strings from your spoon to the bowl) and the flavour of clag which doesn’t help. So after the very unsatisfying breakfast, I headed out in the direction of Anne Frank’s House. I decided to go a different though slightly longer route along Marnixstraat which is a fairly residential street around the outside of the U that I described earlier. I saw the funniest sight on a bicycle too. There was a man riding towards me with a box hanging off one side and this awful yowling noise coming from it. I then realised that the man had a cat in the box and it really didn’t seem to be enjoying its trip out in the rain.

 I then cut through some of the other streets to get to the museum. It would have been easier to find if I’d known that it was right next door to the Westerkerk (you can’t miss it; it has a giant blue crown on the top).

The Anne Frank Museum is quite small and quite expensive (it isn’t included on the museum card and costs 8.50). It takes about an hour to go around the whole place though I imagine it could take longer if it’s crowded. Try to get there before 11am because that’s when all the school groups arrive and it’s packed with teenagers who really don’t want to be there.

The museum is now basically an empty warehouse with the secret annex attached to the back of it and the whole building is now the museum. There are a few items on display that belonged to the family and various photos of them as well. There are also videos of the woman that helped hide them and of Otto Frank when he returned after the war. It was at his request that the house remains unfurnished though they did briefly put furniture into it to make a video and take some photos to show people what it did look like. This is one of the few museums in Amsterdam that is basically inaccessible to the disabled because they have very steep stairs between each of the floors (about 5 lots in all). It’s actually quite a hike. They basically run through what happened in chronological order finishing with Otto Frank being given the diary after the war (he was the only family member to survive the concentration camps) and deciding to publish it. They have the actual diary on display in the last room.

I wanted to go and see the Westerkerk after the museum but it wasn’t open for another 15 minutes and it was blowing a wind from somewhere near the north pole so I wasn’t going to hang around. I continued onto the Bible Museum which was totally not what I expected. It was created around the collection of Leendert Schouten who was a minister in the late 19^th century. He built a model of the Tabernacle and he used to have people come and visit to look at it (making it one of the first museums in Amsterdam). It’s still on display on the top floor along with the rest of his collection of religious souvenirs. He seems to have collected all sorts of stuff like mummified cats, human heads, Holy Land relics. There are cupboards full of random stuff. The museum has also collected some stuff that is related to the Israelites time in Egypt (though loose is a term that I would use to describe the relations) including a mummy and a mummified head. The tabernacle is huge and has all these little figures doing various religious things and has an audiovisual display to go with it and explain what it’s all about. He made it exactly to the descriptions in Exodus (not a book that I’ve read so I can’t vouch for his accuracy).

On the next floor down there is an exhibition on the Temple Mount and it explains the significance of the site to the Jews, Muslims and Christians and what was said in various holy scriptures. They have a model of the mosque from the 18^th century when it was very fashionable for rich people to go on holidays  to Jerusalem. They also have a time line of when who built what on the top of the hill. It seems to regularly get burnt down or demolished and something else built on top of it. On the ground floor they have a model and some drawings of what the Temple of Solomon is meant to have looked like also based on religious scriptures and something that the Romans wrote. They all look very the same but I’m not sure if that’s because they are all accurate or because they all copied the first guy.

The back section of the house has a couple of kitchens that are left from the original town houses and they have been restored to how they were in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Under the floor in one is a storage tank for rain water as the water in the canals was unusable fairly rapidly for anything really. The garden room at the very back is now a reading room and has a lovely garden outside it. It has various plants that were brought back from the holy land by pilgrims but I didn’t go out into it because it was too cold. On either side of the garden room, are the scent cabinets which have little bottles of scented oils that were mentioned in the bible. Don’t sniff too deeply some of them smell really gross!

The final room in the cellar is where they store all the Bibles that they have collected. They have hand written through to modern translations and some children’s bibles as well. They have some of them open and they rotate which ones they have on display.

I then felt in need of lunch so headed through to a café that I had seen the day before and refueled headed back to the Begijnhof. This is a group of houses around a couple of courtyards that were built to house a group of lay nuns. They hadn’t taken vows but did works of charity and were deeply religious. The houses are still lived in now and the church, though no longer catholic, is still used for services. After the church was changed to Dutch Reform the women had a secret church built in one of the houses which you can still visit also. The courtyard is really lovely and many of the houses have little gardens and miraculously the sun came out for a while so it was all very pretty.

The courtyard is pretty much next door to the Amsterdam Historic Museum which was my next stop. The museum is housed in the old buildings belonging to an orphanage and is really big. It’s hard to believe there were that many orphans. The museum goes in chronological order from the damming of the Amstel River to the present time though there are short cuts that you can take and just do the highlight version which only takes one hour. I decided to do the full version and it takes about 2.5 hours all up though I did go quite quickly through some of the sections (getting a bit over models of ships and pictures of guilds). There are explanations for all the items in English but I did find that they expected you to know quite a bit about Dutch history and given that I know who William of Orange is (he doesn’t come from rural NSW) and Abel Tasman (who hasn’t had a mention in any of the museums I’ve visited so far) I’m not doing too well.

The current exhibition in the temporary section is of Amsterdam Masters and has a lot of the pieces that aren’t on display in the Rijkmuseum because of the renovations. I particularly liked the anatomy paintings from the 17^th century that showed the anatomy lecturer doing dissections on various famous murderers who had been killed. There is a great one with the head opened and the brain on view that one of the women who owned thought was a sick man with a wet towel on his forehead.

There is a really nice section in the 20^th century area on kids in Amsterdam and it has photos and writing and possessions from kids from each decade showing how things changed. It’s very cute.

In the evening, I met up with the Australian girl that I met in Maastricht and headed out for some dinner at a local dutch restaurant. Like most of Europe they need to learn that it is unnecessary to boil carrots to the point where you can mash them but it was otherwise very nice and a very cute little place. After dinner I trudged back to the hostel in the cold and went to bed after another long day.

So onto Day 3 which started off badly as it was pouring rain when I got out of bed. Luckily, by the time I had got ready and had another unappealing breakfast, it had eased to just a light drizzle and was coming and going. I decided to start with the Rijksmuseum which is in a huge late 19^th century building at one end of the museum square. It is having renovations done at the moment which started in 2007 and may be finished in 2011 (if they get their act together. They were meant to be finished already but aren’t even close by the look of the large hole out the front and all the scaffolding. This means that most of the building is closed and instead of their full display they have a small (about 200 pieces) collection of their important pieces from the Golden Age. Now I just have to have my rant about the Rijksmuseum and get it out of my system as I know that people are going to go and visit anyway and I would go again when the rest of the collection is on display too.

You arrive and have to queue outside in the rain because they have a security checkpoint set up just inside the door (rather then moving it 10 metres further inside and letting us not get wet. It’s tougher than airport security and I had to give up my water bottle (they wouldn’t even let me take it empty to put it into a locker at the coat check). It clearly didn’t have acid in it as I drank 400mls of it before I went in. So after getting through security with the guards who have clearly been to charm school, you get to go and buy a ticket from some sullen looking people who really look like they want to be elsewhere before you go and check your bags in at the coat check. You have to do this even though they have been through security. You then pick up your audioguide from the few people who actually managed to muster up a smile for you and then enter the collection. They have at least one guard in every room and in some two (I suppose that they have a lot of staff to keep employed while the rest of the collection is closed) and they spend the whole time staring at you like you are about to steal or destroy one of the paintings. Don’t they realize that some of us have just come to look at the art. In one room they told a little boy (like 5) that he was making too much noise and that if he didn’t stop walking so loudly they would have to ask him to leave and in another they had a go at a boy for touching a wall even though it didn’t have any paintings on it. It’s not like you could accidently knock one off anyway. They are bolted to the walls. If there was an earthquake they would remain standing and the walls would crumble around them. And they are still charging people 10 euros to see but a fragment of the collection. So that’s my little rant out of my system. The pieces are really good and they have lots of interesting stuff though I am getting a little sick of the Golden Age portraits. They seriously must have done one of every person living in the Netherlands at the time because every museum has hundreds of them.

I got the audio guide which is 4 euros and I should have got the book instead which is 7.50 but you get to keep it and it basically has the same info in it, you just have to read it for yourself instead of getting that same man and woman who did the voice overs for museums all over Europe to read it to you. I found out how the museums in the Netherlands get such good donations too. The government made it possible for people to pay their death taxes by donating paintings to the museums so people just have to hand over a few Rembrandts and no cash.

I met up with a woman from the hostel for lunch in a little Turkish place a few streets away and then we headed back to the hostel. She didn’t have a raincoat and her umbrella had broken and she was soaking wet and freezing cold. I hung around for a little while to see if the weather would clear and eventually there was enough of a break for me to make a dash for the Red Light District and the Amstelkring Museum. This is a little museum that has been created in one of the houses in the red light district and contains one of the last remaining secret churches from when it was illegal to hold a Catholic mass. For many centuries it was illegal for Catholics to openly practice their faith but in Amsterdam the authorities tended to turn a blind eye as long as people weren’t too blatant about things. To this end, many wealthy catholics built churches in their houses where others could come and services could be held. It wasn’t until the end of the 19^th century that the church was allowed to build a new cathedral (St Nicholas) and the hidden churches were no longer needed. The Church of our Lord in the Attic is still used for services in the winter and you can get married in there as well.

The man who built the church bought three houses next to each other and joined the attics together to get a room big enough for the church. He lived with his family in the front house and the priest from the church lived in the house behind him. The museum has a few of the first rooms set up as they would have been when the family moved in to them in the 17^th century. In the stairwell up to the church there is a little room which has no external windows which is where a chaplain used to sleep. The church is quite a bit bigger than I expected and has quite a large altar and statues and all the bits. It even has its own organ though this wasn’t added until the 18^th century (and I suspect would have annoyed the neighbours a bit). The paintings including the four altarpieces were all done by famous painters from the time. There are lots of pieces that were saved from other churches and have been put on display in the museum including quite a few statues. As you go down the stairs into the back section of the building, they have a few rooms including the kitchens of the back houses where the priest lived. It’s a really interesting little museum and well worth a visit if you are in the area.

On the way back to the hostel, I stopped at a little greek deli that you can also eat at and had some very nice and not deep fried vegetarian moussaka  which made a very nice change from Dutch food. And even better the rain stopped for long enough for me to make it back to the hostel.

Day four I had quite a few things still to do before I left for Haarlem in the afternoon so I started early again. The weather was vaguely improved but it still bucketed for a large proportion of the day. I was going to go for a walk in Vondelpark but it turns out that they have dug a large area of it up and most of the park is currently fenced off and you pretty much can only walk around the outside on the bike paths. Since it was starting to drizzle, I decided against that and decided to go to the Resistance Museum instead. And I’m glad that I did because it’s actually a really good museum.

To get there, I took a slightly roundabout route that went around the other edge of the U basically and brought me into the back of Plantage (the suburb where the zoo is). I walked all the way down the edge of the zoo complex which is also home to the Zoological Museum, the Planetarium and the Museum of Geology. I got to the museum a little early and had to hang around outside in the rain for 15 minutes which was a shame but at least it was warm inside. The museum is in Dutch and English and you can get audioguides for other languages. It covers both the history of the resistance movement during the second world war in the Netherlands and also in Indonesia which prior to the war was still a Dutch Colony. You don’t hear much about the Dutch resistance movement against the Nazis but they were actually quite active (in a passive kind of way). They may not have made many grand gestures but they had a good go at undermining plans for many years. Things were made very difficult towards the end when the people were starving and feeding themselves became a priority but initially when the Germans started to take the Jews and force Dutch men to go and work in Germany, there was quite a bit going on. They have special exhibitions on resistance since the war but they are only in Dutch so I skipped them.

After the museum I walked back in the increasingly heavy rain to go to a little café that I had seen the day before in De Pijp. It’s a kitsch little place with lots of glitter and feathers and each table has a large decorated cake on it. I sat at the peacock table and had a very nice hot chocolate and a piece of chocolate cake. I could have sat there for hours it was so pleasant and cosy. But in the end I had to drag myself back out into the rain and the wind and go to the Van Gogh museum. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go as I’m not a huge fan of his work but it is an interesting enough place and they do have a good collection. It’s very expensive (15 euros) and it’s still 2.50 with the museum card. Thankfully, they have an undercover area where you can queue for a ticket (if they hadn’t I just wouldn’t have gone I don’t think). The special exhibition is about his night paintings at the moment and has both his paintings and items from his private collection as well. His brother Theo was an art dealer and they both had large collections of other people’s art as well. I much prefer some of his earlier work from the collection but I can see the appeal of his later stuff. There is a very good free audioguide for the special exhibition which is worth listening too. The permanent collection doesn’t have free audioguides but you can rent one for 4 euros (which is asking a bit much when you have paid 15 to get in). I didn’t bother and just wandered around and looked by myself. Each section has a little explanation in English anyway that goes through the important points.

After the museum which took a couple of hours, it was back to the hostel to collect my bags and up to the train station again and on to Haarlem which luckily is only 20 minutes away by train. So stay tuned to hear all about Haarlem.