Today felt like the day Amsterdam really introduced itself. Yesterday was about arriving. Today was about slowing down enough to begin understanding where we are.
We woke after a much-needed night's sleep, did a short meditation, made some perfectly acceptable hotel coffee, and started adjusting to European time. England had won their match late the night before, which means we'll be arriving in London just in time for the semifinal later this week. I have a feeling the atmosphere over there is going to be electric.
For reasons I still can't explain, No Doubt's "Spiderwebs" became the soundtrack of the morning — specifically that chorus hook, the one about not being home right now and walking into spiderwebs, so leave a message. It planted itself on a loop and refused to leave. Walking through Amsterdam with a coffee in one hand, Aimee carrying her matcha, bicycles gliding past, and Gwen Stefani's leave a message and I'll call you back looping somewhere in my brain, it somehow fit the morning perfectly.
Along the way I finally settled something that had apparently been bouncing around in my head for years: our hotel used to be a convent. Not a coven. Very different things. Travel is educational in unexpected ways.
Van Gogh
The Van Gogh Museum became one of the highlights not only of this trip, but of any museum I've visited. I expected beautiful paintings. I didn't expect to come away feeling like I'd met the man. We spent hours in there — far longer than we'd planned — and could easily have spent more. It's the kind of place that quietly rearranges your afternoon, and then a little of how you see things afterward.
The museum walks you through his life almost chronologically, floor by floor, and that structure is the whole magic of it. His early Dutch work is dark and earthy — farmers, laborers, The Potato Eaters, simple interiors painted in browns and greens, the palette of someone painting the poor by lamplight. Then Paris arrives, and everything changes. Impressionism, Japanese prints, brighter colors, and suddenly the paintings begin to glow. You can literally watch him find the light, room by room, as if the building itself is charting the transformation. Up close, many of the canvases nearly dissolve into individual brushstrokes; step back a few feet and your brain assembles them into wheat fields, faces, flowers, bedrooms, entire emotional landscapes. I kept doing that little dance — lean in until it's just paint, step back until it's a world.
What struck me most was how much of the man is in the work. This isn't a museum of pretty pictures; it's a biography told in oil. The wall texts and the audio guide weave his letters through the paintings, so you're reading his own words about a canvas while standing in front of it. By the third or fourth room I'd stopped looking at Van Gogh's paintings and started looking with him.
I kept returning to The Bedroom. I've seen it hundreds of times in books. I'd never noticed his hat hanging quietly on the wall, the simple chairs, the rough wooden bed, the uneven perspective — the walls don't quite meet at honest angles. Van Gogh wrote that he wanted the colors alone to express "absolute rest." Knowing how restless his own mind often was makes that painting even more moving. The Sunflowers, in person, are thicker and rougher than any reproduction lets on — the yellow practically stands off the canvas. And his self-portraits were mesmerizing — those swirling blue-green backgrounds make the whole canvas feel alive, almost vibrating, a man studying himself because he couldn't always afford a model.
Toward the end we reached the paintings from Auvers-sur-Oise, his final months, where the canvases grow more urgent and the brushwork more turbulent. For years, Wheatfield with Crows was believed to be his final painting. Whether it actually was almost doesn't matter — the crows, the stormy sky, and the three lonely paths going nowhere carry a weight impossible to ignore. But the painting that stayed with me was Tree Roots.
At first glance, Tree Roots is simply a tangle of roots and trunks climbing a hillside. Then the audio guide revealed something extraordinary: researchers have identified the exact roadside in France where Van Gogh painted it — possibly on the last day of his life. The roots are still there today. Cars drive past them. People walk by them without a glance. One of the most famous images in Western art came from an utterly ordinary stretch of road. Remarkable things, it turns out, often happen in remarkably ordinary places.
By the time we finally pulled ourselves out, we'd been inside most of the day and my head was full — of color, of letters, of a life that burned far too briefly and left far too much behind. If you go to Amsterdam and do one indoor thing, make it this.
Theo and Johanna
One of the day's biggest revelations wasn't Vincent at all. It was the people who believed in him.
Theo van Gogh wasn't simply Vincent's brother — he was his biggest supporter, backing him financially and emotionally through years when almost nobody appreciated the work. Their hundreds of letters are among history's great collections of correspondence. One line stayed with me all afternoon: "Great things are done by a series of small things brought together." That feels true of painting, of science, of travel, of life.
Then there was Theo's wife, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Before today I barely knew her name. After both Vincent and Theo died — Theo only months after his brother — she inherited hundreds of paintings almost nobody wanted. Instead of quietly selling them off, she spent decades organizing exhibitions, publishing Vincent's letters, and patiently introducing his work to the world. Without Johanna, there's a very real chance Van Gogh remains an obscure painter known only to specialists. History remembers the genius. It should also remember the person who preserved it.
Of course, the gift shop got us. Magnets. Socks. Resistance proved completely futile.
A Brewery Beside a Windmill
After several hours surrounded by masterpieces, we made our way to Brouwerij 't IJ, the famous brewery beside an old windmill — exactly the sort of place you hope Amsterdam will have. I had an excellent New England IPA; Aimee had a rosé. Nearby, Vondelpark was alive with cyclists, runners, families, and musicians, everyone simply enjoying a warm Sunday afternoon. Amsterdam seems to understand that cities should be lived in, not merely driven through.
A Food Tour Through Dutch History
Our guide, Barney, turned out to be fantastic, and the tour became far more than food — an afternoon history lesson disguised as lunch. We talked tulips and Gouda, empire and trade. We're vegetarians as a rule, but the tour was a good excuse to bend it for a taste of the local classics. The pickled herring I tried purely to say I had — raw, briny, slippery, the full Dutch experience. Glad I did it once; won't be doing it again. The fried cod, on the other hand, was outstanding — fresh, light, far better than its heavier British cousin, and worth stepping off the usual path for.
The infamous Tulip Mania of the 1630s wasn't really about flowers. It became one of history's earliest well-documented speculative bubbles — people trading contracts for bulbs whose prices briefly reached astonishing heights before collapsing spectacularly. Economics hiding inside gardening. Meanwhile, Amsterdam's real wealth grew from maritime trade through the Dutch East and West India Companies — spices, sugar, coffee, cocoa, textiles — all flowing through these same canals. And the cheese: Gouda isn't one cheese but a style, transformed by aging from creamy and mild to firm, crystalline, and nutty.
We visited the Begijnhof, a peaceful courtyard hidden behind busy streets where the Beguines — religious women who lived in community without taking permanent vows — quietly continued on after the Protestant Reformation transformed Amsterdam in 1578. Nearby stands the city's oldest surviving wooden house, a lone reminder of what Amsterdam looked like before devastating fires changed building practices forever. Inside a traditional brown café, Alice Cooper's "School's Out" played while we ate vegetarian bitterballen and drank a deeply malty Dutch beer — followed by genever, the Dutch spirit that eventually evolved into what the English turned into gin. One glass, several centuries of history.
One of the day's favorite bits of trivia: orange carrots became associated with William of Orange and the Dutch House of Orange-Nassau. Whether every part of the story is literally true almost doesn't matter — it's one of those wonderfully Dutch tales where agriculture, history, and national identity all intersect on a dinner plate.
Then came the fries — worth every bit of their reputation, crisp outside and fluffy inside, served beside a canal with a fancy fried cheese snack that vanished embarrassingly fast. Fresh stroopwafels. Apple pie. And Tony's Chocolonely, whose bars intentionally break into uneven pieces as a reminder that the global cocoa trade remains profoundly unequal. Business with a conscience. I like that. Somewhere in there we also met Miffy, the beloved Dutch rabbit with the little "X" mouth.
Walking Home
Instead of the direct route, we wandered — canals, alleys, bridges, hidden courtyards, unexpected plazas — and eventually passed the Anne Frank House. We stopped. Didn't say much. Some places don't require conversation. Standing there after spending the morning inside Van Gogh's life, I found myself thinking about legacy — two people whose lives ended tragically, neither of whom could have imagined the millions who would one day travel from every corner of the world simply to understand their stories. History can be unimaginably cruel. It can also preserve memory with remarkable tenderness.
The Roundup · Day 02
🍺 Beer of the Day. Brouwerij 't IJ New England IPA beside the windmill, with an honorable mention to the refreshing local witbier on the walk home.
🥙 Bite of the Day. The canal-side fries stole the show, with the fried cod and the vegetarian bitterballen close behind.
🧠 What I Learned Today. Behind many great artists stands someone history almost forgets. Without Johanna van Gogh-Bonger's decades of work after Vincent's death, the world might never have truly known him.
🎵 Song of the Day. "Spiderwebs" — No Doubt. Ska on a loop, all the way to the museum.
📚 Quote of the Day. "There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people." — Vincent van Gogh
❤️ Moment I'll Remember. Standing in front of Tree Roots and realizing the roadside where Van Gogh painted it still exists today. Sometimes extraordinary history is hiding in the most ordinary places.