Last full day in Amsterdam today! The time really has flown. Started off with a walk around the Vondelpark, which is Amsterdam’s equivalent of London’s Hyde Park or New York’s Central Park. It was formed in 1865 and covers an area of 120 acres. It’s an amazingly green and lovely park and a great way to get some peace from the hustle and bustle of the city. (And there’s more space to walk without getting in the way of Dutch cyclists!) I’m reliably informed that it looks wonderful in winter with snow on the ground, and I can believe it! It’s also a great place to people watch, which I spent a bit of time doing, seeing walkers, riders, runners, people working out and even a horse rider! 

Eventually I realised that I couldn’t spend all day just lazing around in the park, so I starting making my way northwards towards the city centre. After wandering down some of the canals, I came to the Museum of the Canals and decided to go in. It’s inside one of the old canal houses, and although the word ‘museum’ conjures up an image of rows of cabinets filled with artefacts, this place had almost none of that. Instead it was more of an audio-visual presentation of the way the canals were constructed and their importance to the city. It was very well done! One interesting thing as well was that, looking at a map of Amsterdam like the one above, you’d thing that the canals were built outwards from Dam Square one by one, but that wasn’t the case. They actually built them in an arc from one side to the other (I’ve since heard it described as ‘like a windscreen wiper’ which seems pretty accurate!) The museum also went into a bit of detail on how all the buildings were constructed, using man-power and a large block suspended from ropes and pulleys to drive the massive pine logs into the soft ground down to the harder clay underneath, which were then used as a platform to build on. Also, the way the city blocks were built between the canals left plenty of room ‘behind’ the buildings, so even though it looks like it’s completely built up from the front, there’s actually a lot of space in the middle of the block for courtyards and gardens! It took about 40 minutes to get through the whole thing, and was well worth the visit. 

Went back to wandering around for a bit and grabbed a quick lunch before I found myself back in Dam Square, so I decided to visit the Royal Palace. Because the King, Willem-Alexander, and his family live in The Hague, the Palace is mainly used for state visits and such, so it can be opened to the public when that’s not happening. It’s a very grand building, and very big considering the building challenges the city faces. Interestingly, it was originally built as the town hall in the 1600’s, but was taken over as a palace when the first King, Louis Napoleon (appointed as King of the Netherlands by his more famous brother) came to Amsterdam and saw the opulence of the building. It’s interesting in that some of the rooms that are open to the public are usually used as bedrooms during state visits, so who knows which world leaders might have slept in the room you’re looking at!

The main Citizen’s Hall of the Palace though, is fantastic. It’s 120ft (36m) long, 60ft (18m) wide and 90ft (27m) high! On the floor are a trio of maps, one of the night sky, dating from the mid-1600’s and two showing the two hemispheres of the earth, from the mid-1700’s. There’s also a projector above the floor that shows a current map of the world, so you can compare it to the old one – the inlaid map only shows part of Australia’s coast, as that’s all that had been mapped by the Dutch explorers by the time the map was made! (Indeed, according to that map, Australia was linked to PNG, as no one had really explored the East coast yet!)

From the Palace I headed towards the waterfront, near the Centraal station that I’ll be leaving from tomorrow, and then wandered my way back up the other side of the city to the hotel. Headed back out for a last catch up dinner with some friends and that was pretty much it for my time in Amsterdam. Switching cities again tomorrow, as I’m off down to Brussels, Belgium. Checkout isn’t till 11 though, so I can pack in the morning for a change!