Four Days in Amsterdam: A Slow Burn With a Side of Fries

I knew what to expect from Amsterdam.

What I didn't know was how it would make me feel.

Somewhere in Amsterdam, I photographed a storefront window that read, "Travel is the Best Education Anybody Can Have." I've believed some version of that ever since I became a traveler. But I used to think about it mostly in an outward way: I will learn about Amsterdam. I will learn about Anne Frank. I will learn about windmills.

And of course, travel does teach you those things.

But the more places I go, the more I realize that travel has a way of turning the lesson back on you. Sometimes, the most interesting thing you learn isn't about the place at all.

It's about you.

Normally, when I arrive in Europe, I'm almost immediately struck with a sense of awe. Enormous monuments. Sweeping plazas. Dramatic views. Over-the-top architecture and opulent palaces. It all overwhelms my American senses.

In other words, Europe usually smacks me in the face with its grandeur.

Amsterdam didn't.

Amsterdam is a city that reveals itself slowly. Instead of standing back and admiring it, I found myself eye-level with it—walking beside narrow, slightly crooked canal houses, crossing little bridges, peering through enormous windows and dodging bikes on streets that somehow felt more like neighborhoods than a major European capital.

In the Jordaan, life was happening just behind those enormous windows while hordes of tourists wandered past outside. There was water everywhere, but very little that seemed designed to make you stop and stare.

Rather than grand, Amsterdam felt intimate.

And like a lot of long-lasting relationships, it wasn't love at first sight.

Grandeur makes an immediate impression. Intimacy takes time.

It wasn't until I came home from four days in Amsterdam that I realized just how much the city had stayed with me.

Day One — Looking for Amsterdam

On our arrival day, we kept things casual, as always.

I never like to make big reservations or buy expensive tickets for the first day of a trip. You never know if your flight will be delayed, how tired you'll be or exactly when you'll be ready to start exploring. So after dropping our bags at our hotel in the Nine Straats, we set off on foot with only one real plan, eventually make our way to the Our Lord in the Attic Museum.

It was perfect for an arrival day. Getting there would take us across a good portion of central Amsterdam, giving us our first look at the city without requiring much of a schedule.

Our first stop was the Begijnhof, a surprisingly quiet little courtyard hidden behind the busy streets of central Amsterdam.

You walk through an unassuming doorway and suddenly the city seems to disappear. Inside is a peaceful green courtyard surrounded by historic houses, including one of Amsterdam's oldest surviving wooden homes.

It was beautiful and serene—and our first glimpse of just how much Amsterdam seems to hide in plain sight.

From there, we continued toward Dam Square, one of the busiest and most recognizable spots in the city. The Royal Palace dominates one side, with the Nieuwe Kerk beside it and tourists, pigeons, and bikes seemingly everywhere else.

We admired the Nieuwe Kerk, whose name I still find amusing because construction on Amsterdam's "New Church" began in the 1300s.

New is relative, I guess. Especially when the comparison is the Oude Kerk—Amsterdam's Old Church—which traces its history back even further and was our next stop as we continued through the city.

And the Oude Kerk comes with a very Amsterdam juxtaposition: the city's oldest building (a church!) sits right in the middle of the Red Light District.

A centuries-old church. Red-lit windows. Tourists. Locals. Canals. Bikes.

Amsterdam was already proving difficult to neatly categorize.

Eventually, we reached Our Lord in the Attic, which turned out to be one of those smaller attractions that I probably wouldn't have known about if I hadn't done an unreasonable amount of pre-trip research.

From the outside, it looks like another narrow 17th-century canal house. Inside, you climb through rooms and steep staircases until you reach something completely unexpected—an entire Catholic church hidden across the upper floors.

The church dates to a period when public Catholic worship was prohibited in Amsterdam. Catholics continued to worship in hidden house churches, which city authorities knew about and tolerated as long as worship remained out of public view.

I found the history fascinating, but I also loved the building itself. After spending our first few hours admiring Amsterdam's canal houses from the street, we were suddenly inside one—climbing its narrow staircases, moving through its rooms and getting a sense of what life behind all those tall windows might actually have looked like.

It felt like a particularly good introduction to Amsterdam: something remarkable hidden inside something relatively ordinary.

Afterward, we moved on to something equally important.

Fries.

Our first helping of Dutch frites came hot and extra crispy, absolutely smothered in mayonnaise and satay sauce.

Sounds weird.

Totally works.

That evening, we finished our first day exactly where you should probably spend at least part of any trip to Amsterdam—on the water.

We boarded a canal boat around sunset and watched the city slowly change as the daylight faded. From the water, the crooked canal houses seemed even more picturesque, the little bridges passed overhead, and lights began reflecting off the canals around us.

It was gorgeous.

By almost any measure, we'd had a fantastic first day. We'd wandered through historic neighborhoods, climbed through a hidden church inside a canal house, eaten fries covered in questionable quantities of mayonnaise and cruised through Amsterdam's canals at sunset.

This was Amsterdam. And I was enjoying it.

But when I went to bed that night, I realized I was still waiting for something.

I was exhausted, certainly—the familiar, overwhelming exhaustion that eventually catches up with me after every long arrival day in Europe.

But it wasn't just that.

I had enjoyed everything we'd done. I thought Amsterdam was beautiful. Nothing had gone wrong.

I just hadn't felt it yet.

And I couldn't quite figure out why.

Day Two — Still Waiting

Day two was set to be a big one.

We had a 10 a.m. guided tour of the Rijksmuseum, so we started the morning with a walk through Vondelpark.

My partner and I really enjoy checking out a city's urban parks when we travel. Beyond being a nice break from sightseeing, I think parks tell you something about what it might actually be like to live somewhere. Vondelpark was lovely and serene that morning. The bikes were out in force, of course, but there were also people walking dogs, chatting on benches and simply enjoying the park.

From there, we headed to the Rijksmuseum.

The Rijksmuseum is the Netherlands' national museum and home to an enormous collection of Dutch art and history, including masterpieces by Rembrandt and Vermeer. Its most famous work is Rembrandt's The Night Watch, but the museum has an eclectic mix of treasures from elaborate dollhouses to sculptures, ship models and some of the most celebrated paintings in the world.

This was one place where I was very glad we'd booked a guide.

I'm perfectly capable of walking through an art museum on my own, looking at a painting and thinking, Well, that's pretty. But our local guide pointed out details, symbolism and historical context that I never would have noticed otherwise. Instead of simply looking at famous paintings, I felt like I understood a little more about what I was looking at—and about the history that produced them.

And then it was time for something I was perhaps even more excited about.

Food.

I'm a foodie, and on most trips I try to find time for a food tour. Obviously, I love to eat, but I've also found that food tours are one of the easiest ways to spend a few hours with a local and pick up recommendations and context about a city that you wouldn't necessarily get otherwise.

This time, though, we were going to make our own.

We walked into De Pijp, a lively neighborhood just south of central Amsterdam, and headed for the Albert Cuyp Market. The long outdoor market has been operating for more than a century and today is packed with stalls selling everything from produce and flowers to clothing, souvenirs and, most importantly for our purposes, food.

It was busy. It was cool. It was exactly what I'd hoped it would be.

We moved from stall to stall tasting our way through the market—fresh stroopwafels, kibbeling and various other glorious fried things. Our own little food tour.

I saw raw herring everywhere.

I was not brave enough.

After spending the afternoon eating our way through De Pijp, we headed back toward the center of the city for a very different experience.

That evening, we visited the Anne Frank House.

We spent a little over an hour moving through the building with the audio guide, eventually climbing into the Secret Annex where Anne Frank, her family and four others hid for more than two years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

There are places you visit because they're beautiful. There are places you visit because they're fun. And there are places you visit because standing there makes history feel more real than reading about it ever could.

The Anne Frank House was the latter.

Walking through those rooms, seeing the bookcase that concealed the entrance and standing in the actual space where eight people lived in hiding was sobering in a way that's difficult to adequately describe. You know how the story ends before you walk in.

It was one of the most important things we did in Amsterdam, and one I really don't think you should miss.

Afterward, we walked through the Jordaan, one of the neighborhoods I had been most excited to explore. With its narrow streets, canals, little shops and rows of those tall, crooked houses, it was quintessential Amsterdam—and particularly beautiful in the evening.

We finished the night with another very Amsterdam experience: a traditional Indonesian rijsttafel.

The elaborate spread of small Indonesian dishes is an inheritance from the Netherlands' colonial history in Indonesia. Ours covered the table with different meats, vegetables, rice, sauces and flavors, giving us yet another piece of Amsterdam's history through food.

It had been another long, active and objectively great day.

We'd walked through Vondelpark, stood in front of Rembrandt masterpieces, eaten our way through a market, walked through the rooms where Anne Frank hid, wandered the Jordaan and finished the night over a table full of Indonesian food.

And still, I wasn't in love with Amsterdam.

By then, I had stopped wondering what Amsterdam was missing and started wondering something else:

Do you have to fall in love with a place to be glad you went?

Day Three — The Slow Burn

On our third day, something shifted.

And ironically, it happened when we left Amsterdam.

We had booked an e-bike tour that would take us out of the city, through the Dutch countryside and eventually to Zaanse Schans, the historic windmill village north of Amsterdam.

I had been looking forward to seeing the windmills. Because really, can you go to the Netherlands and not see windmills?

But it wasn't actually Zaanse Schans that changed the trip for me.

It was getting there.

We left the busy streets of Amsterdam behind and started pedaling along narrow bike paths through the countryside.

And suddenly, there it was.

That take-your-breath-away sense of amazement I had been waiting for.

I just hadn't found it where I expected to.

I found it riding a bike with the wind in my hair, surrounded by green fields dotted with sheep and cows. We pedaled beside canals and through small towns, passing moms pushing strollers, people out jogging and, of course, countless other cyclists.

There was nothing grand about any of it.

And maybe that was the point.

We rode through places where ordinary Dutch families were living their ordinary lives, except their backyards had canals running through them and their familiar neighborhood streets occasionally ended with a windmill in the distance.

This was what finally got me.

Eventually, we reached Zaanse Schans, where historic green wooden houses and working windmills line the river.

Today, it's very touristy—but it's also ridiculously picturesque.

And I loved seeing it.

But strangely, the thing I remember most about that day isn't standing in front of the windmills.

It's the ride.

The green fields. The little canals. The small towns. The people going about their day while we pedaled through their everyday lives.

Maybe that's when I finally started to understand Amsterdam.

I'd spent the first two days waiting for the city to show me something spectacular.

Instead, it was asking me to pay attention to something smaller.

That evening, back in Amsterdam, we went in search of a traditional Dutch dinner and ended up with stamppot—a wonderfully unglamorous combination of potatoes and vegetables mashed together and topped with sausage and gravy.

I ordered a Dutch beer to go with it.

It was basic. It was easy.

And it may have been my favorite meal of the trip.

There was something fitting about that.

After two days of wondering why Amsterdam wasn't making a bigger impression on me, my favorite day had been spent riding a bike through ordinary neighborhoods and farmland. And one of my favorite meals was mashed potatoes and sausage.

I'd spent the first two days waiting for Amsterdam to impress me. Maybe I was finally starting to notice what it had been showing me all along.

Day Four — A Little Perspective

On our fourth day, we were up early and headed to Amsterdam Centraal to catch the Eurostar to Brussels.

One of the great things about Amsterdam is how well-connected it is by train, and Brussels is less than two hours away. We had one full day left, and rather than spend it in Amsterdam, we decided to use it to see a little bit of Belgium.

Almost as soon as I stepped out into Brussels, I felt it.

There it was.

That familiar sense of awe I usually feel when I arrive somewhere in Europe.

Brussels felt bigger. Taller. Grander. There were ornate buildings and sweeping squares, dramatic architecture and impressive views around seemingly every corner.

Brussels had me at hello.

We spent the day walking through the city, eating Belgian waffles and frites, buying entirely too much chocolate and taking in the kind of European grandeur that wins me over immediately.

I've written about our entire day in Brussels separately, so I won't take you through it all here.

Because strangely, the most important thing Brussels gave me that day wasn't really about Brussels at all.

It was perspective on Amsterdam.

Back on the train that evening, I started thinking about the two cities.

Brussels had given me exactly what I'd spent the beginning of the trip waiting for. It was dramatic. It demanded my attention. It gave me that immediate rush of Wow, look where I am.

And after four days of wondering what Amsterdam was missing, I finally realized I'd been asking the wrong question.

Amsterdam wasn't missing anything.

I had been waiting for Amsterdam to announce itself. It never needed to.

So, Did I fall in Love?

Amsterdam is smaller, flatter, shorter and more intimate than so many of the European cities I've fallen in love with.

Grandeur is love at first sight. Intimacy is a slow burn.

Brussels says, Look at me.

Amsterdam says, Look around you.

In Amsterdam, you don't stand back and admire the beauty from afar. You live within it. The beauty is right there at eye level.

Now that I'm home, I find myself thinking about Amsterdam far more than I expected to.

And I've been thinking about what that says about me.

Why did I feel like a city needed to stop me in my tracks to impress me? Why was I waiting for Amsterdam to give me the same feeling I'd had in Rome or Athens—or, almost immediately, in Brussels?

Earlier in the trip, I had started to wonder whether you have to fall in love with a place to be glad you went.

You don't.

And maybe that seems obvious. But Amsterdam made me think about it in a way I hadn't before.

That storefront window I photographed said, "Travel is the Best Education Anybody Can Have." I think I understand that a little differently now.

Travel teaches you about other places—their history, their food, their art, the way people live. But sometimes it also teaches you something about yourself.

There is a difference between knowing what you will see and knowing what you will feel when you travel someplace new.

And not every city is going to knock your socks off.

Maybe some cities aren't meant to.

Some cities follow you home.