Ciao, Bella! Blog: Day 3 - Saturday

Whenever we travel, we pack a healthy fear of queues. We’re both somewhat impatient people and we want to make the most of every moment when we’re somewhere new.

Standing in lines? No one’s got time for that!

So on Saturday, I had already booked tickets well ahead of time for the popular Van Gogh museum, a HUGE museum devoted to one of the Netherland’s favorite sons.

After starting early at the hotel and dropping some postcards off at a mailbox – we needed to ask a local for which letter slot to use – we joined the quick-moving line of pre-ticket holders at the museum.

The museum was a Van Gogh-lover’s dream.

Unfortunately, Brendan’s not a big fan of the artist except for his Starry Night, which ironically had traveled to New York during the time of our visit. I enjoyed the audio tour and the special “Insanity” exhibit, where we learned more of the story behind Van Gogh’s madness.

Brendan wryly remarked, “The best part was the crazy part.”

Well, we also enjoyed “The Potato Eaters” but this was a lotta Van Gogh for anyone.

After checking that “must do” off our list, we headed to the nearby MOCO (modern art) museum, where we were unexpectedly about to experience one of the best art exhibits we’ve ever seen – and that’s saying something!

MOCO was hosting a special exhibit of Banksy, an anonymous England-based graffiti artist, and it was AMAZING. The first (and maybe only?) time Banksy art has been shown in a museum setting, the complementary audio tour told the story of each piece. Each piece had something to say - many were political, humorous, and thought-provoking. Just awesome. MOCO was also hosting a traveling Andy Warhol exhibit, and showed several Warhol pieces juxtaposed with Banksy pieces of a similar style. When you featured this art within the intimate house-like feel of the MOCO museum, it was just an amazing experience.

After MOCO, we saw the famous “I Am-sterdam” sign and tried to get a good photo without climbing it. Hey, we’re not as young as we once were!

All that art made us hungry, so we found a good canal-side café and settled in for lunch and a couple beers. The server sold us on the seasonal tap where the proceeds would benefit childhood cancer research – but those beers weren’t very tasty, so we switched to a different kind for our second round. (Sorry, cancer.)

After lunch, Brendan was in the mood for more exploring so we headed out to wander. After we (somewhat non-coincidentally, haha) ended up near the Begijnhof, I was able to convince him to take a quick side trip to view this inner courtyard – one of the oldest in Amsterdam. It was pretty cool to go one moment from the hustle and bustle to being within a quiet-ish square that included two medieval churches. I ducked into one of the churches to learn more while Brendan tolerated the detour. :-) At least he liked seeing one of the only two wooden canal homes in Amsterdam, which was built before fire regulations put a stop to that building practice.

After exploring a new shopping area south of the hotel, we started to feel like we were getting a good navigational sense (or at least Brendan was) of the tricky canals and windy roads.

We came back to the hotel to rest and ordered an easy pizza dinner, enjoying the canal view from our room.