Happy Easter! It is a gorgeous sunny day in Amsterdam We’ve settled in to our stateroom on the riverboat. We’ve never been on a small ship like this and it is a whole lot easier getting around than on those big, ocean cruise liners, that’s for sure. Our room is at the end of the hallway from reception on the 3rd floor. There are just 3 levels, plus the roof deck, called the sky deck. The main lounge/bar/and entertainment area is towards the front of the ship on level two. The restaurant is down a level toward the back of the ship. Before the end of the week I’ll walk around and take some photos. Our stateroom is small but comfortable and we have floor to ceiling windows looking out the starboard side of the ship. The window is actually a sliding glass door so we can open the sliding door (with a railing gate outside) to enjoy fresh air and scenery. The bed faces out the windows and we were warned to be sure to close curtains at bedtime because early in the morning there is likely to be another riverboat moored right next to our ship. You can reach out and touch the next boat. At these port docks up and down the Rhine, the riverboats stack together and you even have to sometimes walk through another ship to get to your ship. That seems pretty weird, but yesterday while we were lined up waiting for our COVID tests upon boarding, about 100 people from the ship moored right beside our ship walked up our gangplank, climbed the outside stairs to our sky deck and crossed over the sky deck to board their ship.
I haven’t quite acclimated to the timezone yet, and besides, I’ve been stressed out by our cellphonee and portable wifi device issues. I purchased European SIM cards before the trip thinking that we’d be ready to roll with full coverage. That didn’t happen because I am unable to get anything to work. The ship’s internet wifi coverage, with 160 passengers all trying to connect and download information, get maps, text home, etc., makes for an incredibly slow, unreliable wifi. My issue will be uploading photos for the blog. That takes up a lot of bandwidth. Hopefully tomorrow, when we have a bit of time in Cologne I’ll find a reliable service provider and see what kind of SIM cards we can get. Right now, if Christine and I get separated during a tour, or somewhere, we wouldn’t have any way to get in touch with one another. I’ve got to fix that, and so part of my no sleep issue has been thinking (worrying) about all that.
However, we had a wonderful morning, our last in Amsterdam. The excursion for us this morning was a canal boat tour. You’ve seen photos from above the canals, so now you’ll see what it’s like to be down in the canal.
The canal boats have to be very low and not too wide so they can get under and through the many bridges. We toured around mostly the western canal area where we had much of our walking tour on Thursday, so things looked familiar. We did see many house boats moored along the canal. These are expensive homes that don’t move. If the canal, for some reason, has be to closed for repairs, it’s apparently a big deal to have your house towed somewhere else. Some of these canal boats look quite dilapidated while others have sculpture gardens on them or fancy outdoor furniture. The tour guide said the rental of the canal section, not to mention the price of the boat itself, was incredibly expensive.
For me the best part of the canal tour was being able to look down all the connecting canals as we passed by bridges. All around the canal districts is either a river or a main waterway canal. The river and waterway canals are very wide, but all the district canals are narrow and very charming.
I mentioned the gables of the house and the 3 types in an earlier post. I called one of them a neck gable, and I learned today that the correct term is “bottleneck,” which makes a whole lot more sense. These bottleneck gables are much simpler than step and bell gables; they are just kind of like a rectangle on end sitting on the top of your house. You might have noticed that at the top of many of the gables is a bean that sticks out and has a hook dangling from the bean. Because the houses are narrow and generally have narrow and steep interior stairs getting materials, goods and furniture up to the upper levels is quite challenging so all these house had a pulley attached to the hook at the top of the gable and that’s how materials were lifted up. These pulleys are still used today to especially lift furniture up to the upper levels.
After the hour-long canal tour, Christine and I broke free from the group and headed off on our own little excursion. Christine wanted to go in to the Royal Palace. The guide Marieke told us that the inside was quite exquisite and worth seeing. I didn’t think it would be open on Easter Sunday, but it was. We ordered tickets on line the previous evening, a good thing, because without a reservation, you couldn’t get in.
The Royal Palace was actually built to be the Amsterdam Town Hall in the mid-1600s. Today it is one of 3 royal palaces used by the royal family of the Netherlands. The Netherlands has a constitutional monarchy and the current king is Willelm-Alexander. This palace isn’t used very often by the royal family and when used it is celebratory, similar to the U.S. president hosting state dinners.
Inside the palace we were able to take a self-guided tour around the second floor. The real interesting history of this palace, though, goes back to the Bonapartes when France ruled the Netherlands in the late 1700s to early 1800s. The Batavian Republic was ruled by Napoleon’s brother, Louis, and Louis moved from the The Hague to Amsterdam and turned the Town Hall into his residence. This place is incredibly opulent. I don’t think any expense was spared in creating huge paintings, lots of sculptures, and all kinds of works of art in furnishings. The celebratory hall, where current state dinners are held, was huge. The ceiling must have been 4 stories high.
The rooms open to the public were all around the perimeter of the building and I think there were about 20 different rooms each having a specific purpose during Louis Bonaparte’s reign.
As with most museums, it was too much to take in. The narrations were good, but our brains were getting too full, so after about an hour, we decided to walk back to the ship. We had a pleasant walk back through some of the same streets we toured on Thursday.
We passed by a little shop that was nothing but little rubber duckies.
I was pretty sure I knew the way back to the ship. Not! I knew we needed to get to the train station, where we were hoping to have time to run into a drug store. Christine kept saying, “this isn’t right,” and I should have listened to her. What I got confused about was that the train station was on an island so that there was a river or waterway on both sides. I thought we were on one side of the station where we would need to go right, but we were on the wrong side, so we went the wrong way. Christine was right, we needed to go left! We did get to the train station (on the correct side), but had a very difficult time finding a drug store. Many of the shops are near the train platforms and to get to them you had to go through a ticket turnstile, so we couldn’t do that without tickets. Just when we were about to give up, saw a drug store just before exiting the building and made our needed purchase.
By this time it was about 15 minutes before departure time of the ship so we hurried down the promenade from the station to the mooring location of the ship. I’m still dumbfounded by the number of bicycles everywhere. Here’s a double-decker bike rack. How can you ever find your bike??
We made it back to the ship in time and at about 1:30 p.m., the Avalon Vista slowly backed out of its mooring location and motored northward up the large canal connecting Amsterdam to the Rhine River, which is about 80 miles from Amsterdam.
Here are a couple of scenes from the end of our day.
We loved our visit to Amsterdam. The 3-day pre-trip package was absolutely worth doing. Amsterdam is an amazing city and the Netherlands seems like a beautiful, interesting country. Maybe we’ll come back and explore some more. But now it is on to the Rhine River and our first stop in Cologne, Germany.