We’ve done canals and crooked houses, and an art museum and vintage shopping. Today we went to one of the larger parks in Amsterdam, and then tram-hopped our way back to the city via a circuitous route.

We wandered around Vondelpark and dodged cyclists. Adrian climbed a tree.

The rose garden in Vondelpark was still blooming.

Back in central Amsterdam we visited the lovely and peaceful Begijnhof.

Near our hotel the Beurspassage caught our eyes. The ceiling mosaic is filled with motifs inspired by the canals, including fish, rusty bicycles, and for some reason a tiger, and the chandeliers are made of bicycle parts.


We also went to see the allegedly famous floating flower market, which was much less impressive and interesting than it sounded. The shops were technically floating but they were just large booths that were open on one side, and you couldn’t even see that they floated. And the flowers were mostly seeds and bulbs this time of the year.

There was a cafe near the flower market, though, that sold macarons.


And then it was time to start heading home.

Amsterdam was an interesting city to visit, and parts of it were very pretty. But it’s not one of my favourite cities and I’m not sure I’d want to come back for a second visit. I didn’t like the crowds, or the ever-present smell or weed, or all the cigarette smoke.

In the end the best part of the weekend for me was simply spending three full days together as a family. At home we’re often each doing our own thing. Here we were together all the time.

We started both yesterday and today with luxurious breakfasts at a café that Ingrid had found online. Pluk on Berenstraat, in case you find yourself in that area. The online reviews are very mixed but we got very good food, though the service was rather slow.

We had seen enough canals and crooked houses and cute little streets yesterday and wanted something different today, so we went to the Rijksmuseum.

The museum was very visitor-friendly, with easy-to-read maps that guided people to the most popular paintings, but also to other parts of the collection. The popular works – like their one and only Van Gogh – had large crowds in front of them, so I didn’t even bother to try and look at those. There were plenty of other interesting things to see.

Even though we all walked in the same rooms, we often split up because of our diverging interests. Ingrid is interested in art and paints herself, so she looks at details and technical aspects that Adrian doesn’t care much about. So she and Eric (who also painted when he was young) looked at the paintings with artists’ eyes, while Adrian and I looked at them with general curiosity.

We noted, for example, the prevalence of grapes, glass bowls, and curls of lemon peel in 17th century still life paintings.

The curators at the Rijksmuseum had done a great job with the signage. All too often, museums label each work with its title, maker and year, and nothing more. Here there were often interesting background facts, and info sheets with even more facts and stories.

When we tired of paintings, we looked at cannons, porcelain, Delft pottery and ship models.

I liked this glass vase by Émile Gallé, with its irregular patterns borrowed from various cultures.

And this repeatedly darned sock, found in a seaman’s chest after a shipwreck.

From high culture to low. In the afternoon we took the boat to North Amsterdam to a large flea market that Ingrid wanted to browse for vintage clothing. She didn’t find anything that fit, but I bought a jacket.

Some of the most crooked, tilting, slanted houses I saw in Amsterdam.

I wonder what it feels like to live in one of them. They must even out the floors, or the houses would be unlivable. But do they do the same with the inside of the walls? Or do they just accept that furniture doesn’t stand flush with the wall, and kitchen cabinets are crooked?

Just a bunch of photos of Amsterdam’s canals.

This was our first time in Amsterdam, for all of us. Mostly we just walked around the city, with no particular goals or destinations in mind. This large and imposing building is apparently the royal palace – looking almost as dreary as the royal palace in Stockholm.

We quickly left it behind us and walked among the smaller streets and all the pretty little canals instead.

The weather was unseasonably warm. Even when there was no sun, we didn’t need any jackets. Pleasant, but worrying – this is not what it’s supposed to feel like at this time of the year.

The streets were narrow and chock full of cyclists. It took some getting used to, before we learned to dodge them. They don’t behave like Swedish cyclists: they’re slower, closer to walking pace (compared to the lycra-clad racers you often see in Stockholm) but more numerous, so in aggregate they move differently. And they’re all helmetless – which makes sense given the lower speed, but still felt weird.

Amsterdam has fewer inhabitants than Stockholm, but so many more tourists, and therefore so many more shops. We kept finding fun little shops everywhere. Central Stockholm is all fashion chains and other large, impersonal stores instead.

The tourists keep the shops alive, but I wonder what made them happen to begin with. A history and culture of shopkeeping, as opposed to Sweden’s history of large industry employing masses of workers? An inner-city architecture of small buildings and thus small retail spaces where you can’t even fit an H&M, whereas Stockholm’s large 1960s city centre has the opposite – mostly large spaces that are unsuitable for small shops?

Ingrid liked the vintage clothing shops. I was horrified to see that ugly 1990s fleece jackets are now considered desirable.

This antiquarian bookshop sold reproductions of prints of all kinds, ranging from “here is how you recognize measles” through anatomical drawings and comparisons of tulip varieties to “this is how you arrange a centerpiece for your dinner table”.

Most of the houses in Amsterdam lean one way or another. Or several: they lean sideways because the foundation sank, and the facade leans forward because it was built that way to allow goods to be hoisted to the upper levels. I kind of got used to it after seeing enough leaning houses, but then you come across something like this and it’s hard to grasp how it even remains stable. It must be a challenge to be a window-maker here, to produce windows that fit these crooked walls.

Away from the small canals and back to the innermost city, we were surprised at how crowded the streets were, mostly with groups of young people.

The inner city kept surprising us with red-light streets. Some were clearly noticeable and avoidable, others were sort of just in our way when we wanted to get from A to B and there was no easy way around them. And some looked normal when we entered them and only turned “red” at the other end. You can avert your eyes and try to pretend they’re not there, but it made things uncomfortable for the kids, especially Adrian. Not the most family-friendly city centre.

And the “coffee shops” everywhere. The smell of cannabis – and cigarette smoke, there are so many smokers here and smoking is apparently allowed in most places – got really annoying. Now we’ve seen the inner city, been there, done that, checked the box, let’s leave it behind and get away from here.

When our legs were tired of walking, we went for a boat tour on the canals. Despite the tour being marketed as family-friendly, the boat was effectively a floating bar and both the crew (not the captain though) and most of the passengers spent the entire trip drinking. We got to see the city from new angles, but didn’t get the kind of guided tour that we had been hoping for.

We’re spending a long weekend in Amsterdam, since Eric was already here for work and next week is autumn break for the kids.

Hotels in central Amsterdam are crazy expensive, especially when booking at short notice. This is definitely one the most basic hotels I’ve ever stayed at, and it’s still more expensive than the luxurious spa hotel in Bled. It’s officially got a single star, and it truly offers no extras. There is a room with four beds and a small desk and enough room to walk between the beds, and a functional bathroom, and that’s it. No TV, no breakfast, no safety box, no elevator.

Everything is clean, though, and mostly whole (though there are cracks in the sink) so they’re delivering on their promises. No complaints.

Oh, there is actually one luxury: plenty of outlets, both 220 V and USB-C, for charging electronics. Basic, but also modern.

Birchleaf spirea, after the birchleaf part of them is gone.

This is the SD card from my main camera. In fact the actual SD card is a micro SD and almost too small to be photographed, and this one is an adapter to bring it back up to a reasonable size. The thumbnail-sized fingernail-sized card itself fits about 4000 high-resolution RAW photos, which is pretty amazing. I remember floppy disks, and having to swap them out halfway through installing an application or running a game, because you couldn’t fit all of it onto one disk.

Less amazing is the write protection tab, which keeps catching on the the card slot on my computer when I insert the card, and moving to the ON position against my wishes. It was getting to the point where it took me ten tries to get my photos imported and deleted from the card.

I bought a new card of a different brand, and it works much better for me. The write protection tab is much harder to move. Weird, how two makes of the same thing, that is so strictly standardized when it comes to size and shape and performance and protocols, can still differ so much in such a tangible way.

Quince being candied, this year again.

The fifth and last session in my embroidery course, and today is about combining embroidery with painting.

I dug through our cupboards yesterday evening and found some fabric paint. The greens were from when I printed napkins. The purple I have no idea about and I’m not even sure if it was me who bought it, but it contrasts nicely with the green. A bit dried out and slightly lumpy, but after adding a splash of water it was perfectly functional again.

Adrian was immediately interested in joining me so we painted one square each.

When it was time to embroider, it was easy to be inspired by Adrian’s wild, spontaneous and chaotic design. The swirls and sweeps were crying out for swirly, sweeping embroidery.

As usual, we were out of time before I felt done. It needs more swirls.

I have a whole pile of half-finished embroidered squares now. Some I have an actual project idea for, others still need thinking. This one is going to be interesting enough that I would really like to find some kind of use for it, not just bundle it away somewhere. Maybe I need a pretty bag for… something?