The great thing about having gone out of Amsterdam the last couple of days was that meant we could explore some of the city today without repeating ourselves.
A Place of Calm
When we were here last time we stumbled upon a place called Begijnhof which we’d remembered as a quiet area in the centre of the bustling city so we headed straight there. Despite the website saying that they were open for 8 am when we arrived we found the time was actually 10 am so we had a wander along the side of the nearby canals to fill the time.
Behind an unprepossessing wooden door is a small grass area surrounded by attractive-looking Dutch-style residences. These include the oldest house in Amsterdam, dating back to 1420. The houses are still lived in by single women as they always have been and it must be a pleasant place to live apart from all the tourists walking through and gawping at your front door. It is very quiet in there with buildings on all sides closing out the sounds of the city just the other side. It is a very different side to Amsterdam which is geared to the more hedonistic way of life.
From all of these signs saying sorry but we’re closed
Amsterdam is very much a night-time place with many shops not closing until 10 pm but this also means that they don’t open until 10 a.m. at the earliest. Today, there were just a couple of shops that I wanted to visit: the LEGO shop and the Tony’s Chocolonley superstore. We went to both and they both had queues of people outside waiting to get in. I refuse to queue to get into a shop and so we moved on.
And Back Again
Early afternoon, we made our way back to Amsterdam Centraal for the final time this holiday. The return journey wasn’t direct, so we had a couple of hours in Brussels, where I had the annoyance of my brand-new passport not working in the automatic machines. The very nice lady at passport control told me that they are not allowed to tell me why it failed, but it was because the chip doesn’t work, but I didn’t hear that from her. That’s pretty frustrating, as I now have ten years to live with the issue. She also told me that if I complained to the passport office they would likely say it was ‘user error’. *Sigh* Oh well, that doesn’t detract from what has been a fantastic short break.
