Things to do in Amsterdam

So, by now I've told you where to stay in Amsterdam, how to move around, and how to pay for stuff.
Now's time to enjoy the place!
(This is based on the trip my wife and I did on April - May 2016)

Before I get started I should tell you that Amsterdam is geographically a very small city. At least for people like us who live in Utah.
Amsterdam has mostly narrow one-way streets, so when you have to cross 5 blocks, it is usually less than 300 feet.

We traveled the city from Amsterdam Centraal to the bottom of the city, on bike, within 1 hour.
On maps, everything in Amsterdam seems dispersed and possibly far away from each other. In reality, you can go from any 2 points inside of Amsterdam within a hour or less on bike. On tram is even quicker.

Attractions and Museum

Red light district

Yes, Amsterdam has a red light district where there are prostitutes for hire.
You know that. I know that. Even your grandma knows that.
It's there. It's real. It's in every city map.
There are probably websites fully dedicated to it, and I think that's all there's to say about it.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about the good stuff.

Anne Frank's House

I'm not big into museums and I rather spend my time around the city, but this place is a must see, even if you barely care about World War II and its history.
This tour was a lot more emotional and touching that I ever thought it'll be, so I would suggest you to be expecting something similar.

Sign outside Anne Frank's house

The house has been remodeled to now be a museum, but most of the house itself still remains.
You get to walk through the house, including all of the bedrooms, kitchen and dinning area.
The whole place is unfurnished, and they explain that Otto Frank (Anne Frank's dad, who survived the Holocaust) decided to leave it this way to symbolize the void left by all the deaths of Jews during WWII. Throughout the house there are also multiple video stations with narrations from Anne's diary and interviews, along with WWII concentration camp videos.

I won't spoil the whole place for you. Just keep in mind that, unlike other museums and galleries, this one won't travel around the world. This means you can only see it in Amsterdam.

I will suggest you to get your tickets online before you go. Lines outside the house are huge, and they only let people get into the house for blocks of time. What this means is that if your tickets are for 10:15am, you can enter the house between 10:00am and 10:30am. So basically only a specific number of people can be inside at the same time.
This was very smart of them, and it avoids having people cramped inside.

Getting there is super easy. The house is in downtown (Centrum) so you can walk to it from Amsterdam Centraal (the train's central station), or you can ride bikes to it and just park them anywhere outside.
You can also get there by taking tram number 5, and even the tram's station voice says the stop is for Anne Frank's house.
Driving to the house is probably a bad idea simply because the area is crowded with jaywalking tourist and bikes, and parking close to the area requires a fairly large amount of luck.

Photography and cell phones are not allowed inside, and while you could take pictures (some people did), it felt really weird just because of the nature of the place.

Art Museums

Amsterdam has several art museums, with the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum being probably the largest ones, and the only ones we visited.
Both museums are looking at each other on the side of a large park named "Vondelpark" and are part of Amsterdam's "Museum district."

Van Gogh Museum

Van Gogh Museum

The Van Gogh museum contains pieces specifically created by Vincent Van Gogh and his friends, plus a traveling gallery that changes from time to time. When we went, the showcased gallery was Easy Virtue.

The museum is laid out in a way that you do a chronological travel through Van Gogh's life, teaching you about his family, what they did, what Vincent Van Gogh did for a living at that time and what art pieces he made at the time.
Once it gets to the point of Vincent Van Gogh's travels to Paris and other cities, it also shows art pieces of multiple other artists who were friends with Van Gogh in those cities.

Make sure you get there early. You can purchase the tickets at the door, but even the line for tickets can be huge. After purchasing tickets you have to do another line to get in.
Inside the museum there's a cafeteria, but just plan on eating something simple and small there.
The museum has 3 levels, so plan on spending at least 2 hours for the section on Van Gogh. The separate seasonal gallery is on the other side of the museum.

You can get to the Van Gogh Museum by bike, train or car. Parking is always a pain, so its your own gamble.
Pretty much every train line goes through the Museum District, or around Vondelpark, so train is a safe bet.

Rijksmuseum

I'm pretty sure this is the largest museum in The Netherlands.

Rijksmuseum - Google images

Located across a section of Vondelpark from the Van Gogh museum, this museum holds art pieces and national treasures from multiple artist and time periods.
Inside you will find paintings from Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer and many others.

Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" inside Rijksmuseum (sorry, iPhone picture)

Vermeer's "The Milk maid" inside Rijksmuseum

Aside from famous paintings, you will also find sculptures, medieval armor, rugs and other gifts given to The Netherlands throughout history.

This museum has 4 levels, and 2 wings. This means that you can spend a large portion of the day here looking at everything this museum has.

Since Rijksmuseum is also around Vondelpark in the Museum district, any pretty much any train will take you there. Biking is also a good idea.
Parking in the close proximity of this museum is probably impossible.

"I amsterdam" sign

The fairly famous "I amsterdam" sign is located outside Rijksmuseum facing the Van Gogh museum.
You really can't miss it. If you do, ask any of other dozens of tourist trying to take a picture of themselves there.

My wife is somewhere there

From outside the Van Gogh museum, looking at Rijksmuseum

There was also a second, less crowded "I amsterdam" sign right outside Schipol airport. However, the cars and advertisement around it make it far less exciting than having Rijksmuseum as the background.

"I amsterdam" sign outside Schipol airport

Canal tours

Amsterdam has several canals running across the city, so taking a canal tour is a pretty nice and easy way to do some sightseeing.
There are a few canal tour companies, and they seem to do pretty much the same, on the same type of boats and travel the exact same route.
Their prices range from €11 to €18, depending on the canal company. "Lovers" canal tours seemed to have been the cheapest ones at the time.

Their pick up locations are located outside the Amsterdam Centraal station, and around the canal outside of Rijksmuseum. I say around because at the Rijksmuseum stop they are not all together.
The boats start and end at the same location.

We took a canal tour on "The blue boat" company. The tour took 75 minutes and it includes a spoken narration of certain key places you pass by. The narration is done with headphones located at each table, so you get to chose your language and volume, or skip it all together.
About 90% of the boat is covered with a glass roof, but the back of the boat is open.

You should definitely do it, if for nothing else than the ability to do a tour seating down and without street traffic, and you get to learn a bit about the city's history.

A few other options include dinner canal tours with a variety of food and drink options, "hop on, hop off" canal boats that stop at multiple places along the canal, and even canal bikes.

Do a city bike tour

When planning this trip we decided to do a bike tour the first day we landed. Our flight was from Portland to Amsterdam and it arrived at like 11:00am, so we decided that we were going to stay up until it would get dark, and one of the things we wanted to do was a bike tour.
This turned out to be a great idea. Not only we got to move our legs after a 10 hour flight, but we also got to see the city and learned how to ride a bike around town.

We took a 3 hour city bike tour from Mike's bike tour. The tour was done in English, and aside from the odd political commentaries done by the tour guide, we learned a lot about street signs and how to "drive" a bike in this city with tons of bicycles.
I know 3 hours sound like a lot, but about 1 hour was a final "meet and greet" type of thing at a local bar, and we stopped every 15 minutes or so.
The cost was €25 and it included the bike, and much needed ponchos (it was raining most of the tour)

I would strongly suggest you to take gloves and a hat. Even with 50 degrees Fahrenheit, a 3 hour bike ride was pretty brutal with the humid wind.

Go to a football (soccer) game

This is not really specific to Amsterdam, but we did go to an Ajax game at Amsterdam ArenA.
Out of all the things we did in our entire trip, this really felt like the least touristic thing. This might be the one place where we traded the selfie sticks and kissy faces for beer cans and loud drunk guys.
Oh, and that's even before we got to the gate to enter the game.

My wife, an avid Real Salt Lake fan, expected to go to a European football game and have a similar experience as what we get here at home for an MLS game.
Me, being from Chile, knew exactly what I was going for and didn't back out of the idea of going to a European football game for the first time in my life.
Believe it or not, it was my wife's idea of going to this game. She even got upset when I suggested she might not enjoy going there. Happy wife, happy life, right?

Let's just say we didn't see strollers, toddlers, moms texting, or even more than 5 women in our section at all.

At the end, Ajax won 4-0 against Twente in their last game of the local season, and my wife was surprised this was the first place on our trip where she didn't have to do a line to go to the women's restroom after the game.

Inside Amsterdam ArenA

If you're really lucky, you can go instead to an international game between The Netherlands and some other country. I say lucky because international games happen once every 3-4 months, and they are usually sold out games. So, if you happen to be there during a game, and you happen to get a hold of some tickets, it should be mandatory to go to such game.
Amsterdam ArenA is the stadium of both Ajax, and the national team of The Netherlands.

Amsterdam ArenA also offers tours of the place on days without a game.
For tickets to Ajax games, or tours of the arena, go to visitajax.com.
Tickets for games of the national team, or concerts, need to purchased whenever a date is set for a game, and seem to be done here. This is usually only announced a few months before the game.

To get to the stadium, take a train from Amsterdam Centraal. The stadium is kind of far away from downtown so you wouldn't want to make the trip on foot, and it might take around 30+ minutes on bike from downtown. There was also a tram line that takes you there, but with so many stops we just decided to go through the central station and take a bigger train without stops.

Keukenhof Gardens, and surrounding areas

Going to Keukenhof was my wife's favorite part of the trip. Since this took an entire day, and we did a lot of cool stuff, I decided to have a dedicated blog entry just for Keukenhof.

Ride bikes and look up!

This was personally my favorite part of the whole trip, and it was also the least expensive.
There were several things we did in this trip that I guess we could've done elsewhere, but there's nothing that compares to just tour the city, at your own pace, and look at those 300+ year old buildings.

The row houses in Amsterdam are the postcard image of what I thought The Netherlands would be, and seeing so many of them, of so many colors was just fascinating.
Mix that with Amsterdam's narrow "walk only" streets with cobblestone grounds, and I quickly realized that just riding around was my own version of a museum. Unfortunately, the pieces of this made-up museum would not travel to a city near me.

House sinking into the ground.
Notice how the left side has an uneven space against the house next to it

Amstel Hotel
Shot from across the Amstel river

Renting bikes around Amsterdam costs anywhere from €5 to €20 euros a day, and it just depends on where you rent them and what kind of bike you get.

So, just get a map and go out and smell the roses! (what you will smell is not actually roses, but rather second-hand cigarette and marijuana smoke, so try to not inhale too much)

Other things, which we didn't do

Amsterdam, being the capital city of The Netherlands has tons of things to offer. We just didn't have time for all of them.
Here are other things you can also do:

• Visit the Royal Palace of Amsterdam
• Visit the NEMO Science Museum
• Visit the Amsterdam Museum
• Go to Rembrand's House
• Tour the Heineken beer brewery in the Heineken Experience
• Do it all over again at night!