As the title of this blog entry suggests, we spent our entire day at the Rijksmuseum, and we still didn’t see the entire collection.  We started off the morning walking in the rain, but after a short while, the rain stopped and it was a nice walk.

The very first thing we headed for was Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch.”  This is definitely the centerpiece of the museum and we thought that earlier less people would be there.  Wrong.  We couldn’t even hear the commentary on our museum recorders.

We continued through the museum, upstairs, downstairs, all around.  There is so much to see.  We were both glad we had rented the audio guides as these commentaries added to the experience.

Here are some samples of what we were able to see:

Delft violin. One of five in existence.

Stained glass window in main hallway

Vermeer’s “The Kitchen Maid”

We had lunch at the Museum Café, a cheeseboard and a charcuterie platter and it was quite good.  Back we went to see more of the collection, and suddenly, the closing announcement was broadcast.  We left with about a quarter of the museum left to see.

This was our walk home:

As you can see from the look of the skies, we got caught in heavy rain.  We got back, dried off, started our laundry, and are now going to have some cheese, sausages, and bread for supper.  Tomorrow we are thinking of taking an architectural walk, suggested in the DK Amsterdam Guide Book.  We’ll see how the weather looks and if our muscles recover from today.