Dhanya Damodaran

Jan 17, 20202 min read

Feel Dutch In Netherlands

Updated: Feb 12, 2020

Visited in July 2015

Welkom in Nederland!!

We spent only 2 days in Amsterdam before we headed to Germany. The itinerary was very simple...

1) Amsterdam city sights and museums

2) Zaanse Schans

Since it was summer, the days were pretty long and we had a lot of time to walk around the city. As we arrived Amsterdam, we used the metro to commute and checked in to our hotel. We headed to Zaanse Schans the next day morning. This place is easily accessible by metro from Amsterdam and gives you the typical dutch countryside experience with several wooden windmills, houses, farms etc and is a lovely scenic destination to spend 4-5 hours minimum.

The place gives you a typical dutch feel with cheese factories, wooden shoe factories, dairy farms and windmills. We can climb up on the wooden windmills and see how the mill works. These are operational wind mills.

Amsterdam city has bicycles that outnumbers any other means of commutation. You find cyclists everywhere and we can hire them for our trip as well. A dedicated cycle track on all major roads make it the most convenient mode of transport. This helps the city remain green, less polluted and is cool to watch.

There are plenty of museums in Amsterdam, more than 75! ranging from the famous Rijksmuseum, Space Museum and Van Gogh's museum to Tulip, Torture and Sex museum!!

We visited a few of those and they are well maintained and interesting ones.

By the evening, we strolled into the famous Red Light District in Amsterdam. Quite contrary to what people think, this neighborhood has a friendly atmosphere and is not dangerous at all. We were probably the only ones having a child with us visiting the place :). Lot of brothels, sex shops and girls at work with customers and tourists flocking around. The place gets lively by night and interestingly, the tour companies conduct walking tours of the site. Amsterdam is truly different, liberal and tolerant, gives social status to prostitutes. Instead of criminalizing, the people do enjoy this and prostitution is a legal profession and prostitutes are tax payers of this country. The place is named as Red Light District after the red neon lights at the windows were the women are at work. I haven't clicked any photos here as it was written so in front of the shops.You can as well visit the Old Church in the same neighborhood.

A ride through the beautiful canals is a must do while in Amsterdam. We took one in the evening and its nice to see the old city and its charming buildings while enjoying a drink in the boat.

The next day, we visited the Van Gogh's Museum, the Diamond Museum and the Vondel Park. Finally, we took a ride around in tram in the city to the Central Train Station for our onward journey to Berlin.