This morning we walked the Museum Quarter of Amsterdam to go to the Van Gogh Museum.  It was a really nice walk, not too far from our apartment, and again we were intrigued by the Amsterdam architecture.  Everything from Art Deco to what looks very similar to the cities in the Hanseatic League.

Many of the major museums in Amsterdam are all around a central park area.  We had advance tickets and, believe me, they are worth getting as the lines are long everywhere.  The Van Gogh Museum is a wonderful walk through Van Gogh’s short life.  There are no pictures allowed inside, so we can’t share any of the art work, but it was worth every minute of the two and a half hours it took to go through four floors.  We had reserved audio guides ahead, and these helped Van Gogh’s story unfold.  We highly recommend this museum.

After exiting the museum, we were able to get some pictures of the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum, along with the Concert Hall and other museums.

Concertgebouw

Van Gogh Museum

Stedlijk Museum

Rijksmuseum

Also in the park area is a memorial to the women victims of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, a camp for women and children only.

We still had about two hours until our dinner reservations, so we walked down a very high end shopping street, P.C. Hooft Straat.  Prado to the right of us, Louis Vuitton, to the left.  Ahead of us Chanel, Tiffany, Cartier, Gucci, $3000 men’s shirts.  They had doormen to keep out the riff-raff (like us).

Then we went to Sama Sebo Restaurant and had our first rijsttafel.  It may be the only one we ever get, not because we didn’t like it, we loved it, but because there were twenty dishes of food on our table!  There was chicken satay, beef with a soy sauce, pork in a spicy sauce, tofu, sweet potato crunchies, white rice, fried rice, cucumbers, bananas, fried chicken legs, just to name a few.  Josh, you may wish to avoid Indonesian food as there was whole roasted peanuts, ground peanuts, peanut sauce and peanuts cooked along with Heaven only knows what.  Quite an experience.  We did a good job eating most of it.  Luckily we had to walk about a half mile to get home.  Tomorrow we are planning to go to the Rijksmuseum.  More then.