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Amsterdamthree nights, two bikes, and the first weekend the canals are lit
One museum, not two. Saturday is the Van Gogh Museum, then De Pijp and the old city by bicycle. Sunday has no ticket at all: the canal ring in daylight, the Spiegelkwartier, the Nine Streets and the Jordaan, on foot and at your own pace. Both days end on the canals after dark, which this weekend means the Light Festival, opened the day before you arrive. The whole of it fits inside the canal belt, De Pijp and the Museumkwartier; nothing crosses the water.
What the light is doing
Eight hours of day, and they all belong to the bikes
Sunrise is around 08:20, sunset 16:35. That is the shape of both days: out by half past nine, the museum on Saturday morning, the city in the early afternoon, and back on the canals by half past four so you ride into the lights as they come on rather than after. Nothing worth seeing outdoors happens after five, and nothing worth seeing indoors needs daylight.
Late November in Amsterdam is about 7°C by day, with rain on something like half the days and wind off the IJ that makes it feel colder on a bike than on foot. Gloves matter more than a coat. Rain improves exactly one thing here — the Light Festival, which doubles in the wet canal water — and ruins nothing on this itinerary, because the only long ride is a twenty-minute one through a park.
The Light Festival
Edition 15 of the Amsterdam Light Festival runs 26 November to 17 January, so your Friday is its second night. Light art by Dutch and international artists along the canals, bridges and quays of the centre, on a brand-new route this year, free to see from the street from about half past four until eleven. The route had not been published when this was written; the festival's own app has it on the day, and the Herengracht has been its spine for fifteen years.
Off the train at six, a hotel twelve minutes away on foot, and dinner five minutes from the door.
Out of the station, across the Prins Hendrikkade, down the Singel and right onto the Keizersgracht — the Emperor's canal, the widest of the three rings dug in the 1610s. Check-in runs from four, so the room is waiting. Bags down, coat back on: the Herengracht is one canal over and it has been lit since yesterday.
Rijsttafel is the one table Amsterdam lays better than Paris, and it is the right first dinner for someone seeing the city for the first time: fifteen to twenty small dishes around rice — rendang, satay, gado-gado, sambal goreng, a dozen you will not name — the colonial feast the Dutch brought back from Java in the nineteenth century and never let go of. Order the rijsttafel for two and a Bintang. It is the whole city's history on one table.
If they are full, Tempo Doeloe on the Utrechtsestraat is the old benchmark across town — twenty minutes on foot, and the spice markings on the menu are honest — and Bussia on the Reestraat is Piedmontese and four minutes away.
Out of the restaurant and straight down to the water. The installations sit on the canals and the bridges and you see them from the quay for nothing. Walk the Herengracht south as far as the Gouden Bocht — the Golden Bend, where the richest merchants built double-width houses in the 1660s — and come back up the Keizersgracht to the hotel bar. Save the full loop for tomorrow, when you have bikes.
Bikes from ten to ten. Van Gogh in the morning, De Pijp for lunch, the medieval city in the afternoon, and the canals as the lights come on.
The hotel does breakfast from eight and it is fine, but the Saturday boerenmarkt on the Noordermarkt is the better reason to be up: cheese, bread, cider, mushrooms, and Winkel 43 on the corner, which has made the same apple pie for decades and serves it with a wall of cream. The Noorderkerk itself is Hendrick de Keyser's last church, 1623, built on a Greek cross so that nobody in the Protestant congregation sat further from the pulpit than anyone else.
Collect the bikes from the hotel. South along the Keizersgracht, across to the Leidseplein and in through the Vondelpark's main gate — the park's long diagonal is the nicest kilometre of cycling in the city, laid out in 1865 as an English landscape garden on peat so soft the whole thing has sunk and been raised several times since. Out the far side at the Van Baerlestraat and you are on the Museumplein with the Rijksmuseum on your left and the Van Gogh in front of you. Racks on the square.
The largest Van Gogh holding anywhere — some two hundred paintings, five hundred drawings and seven hundred letters — and it exists as one collection because Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, refused to break it up, spent thirty years placing it in exhibitions, and her son put it into a foundation in 1962 and the state built this museum around it. Rietveld's building takes it chronologically over four floors: the dark Nuenen years and The Potato Eaters, Paris and the colour arriving, Arles and the Sunflowers and the Bedroom, Saint-Rémy, then the Auvers wheatfields of the last ten weeks. Two hours is right; three with the café. The Kurokawa wing holds the temporary show.
The Rijksmuseum is three hundred metres away with the largest de Kooning exhibition in Europe for forty years on until 17 January. One museum a weekend, and this is the one.
Five minutes east. The Albert Cuyp has run down this street since 1905 and is the city's daily market: fresh stroopwafels pressed hot at the stand, herring with onions eaten standing up, cheese, flowers, and a hundred metres of nonsense. De Pijp around it was the nineteenth-century workers' district — long, narrow, built fast to a grid, which is why it has the densest run of cafés and kitchens outside the Jordaan. Lunch on whichever side street looks fullest.
North from De Pijp along the Amstel, over the Blauwbrug with the Magere Brug on your right, and up the Kloveniersburgwal — the city's medieval moat — past the Trippenhuis, built in 1660 by two brothers who made their money in arms and put mortar-shaped chimneys on the roof to say so. Leave the bikes at the Spui and walk into the Begijnhof: a courtyard of lay sisters' houses, silent, with the oldest wooden house in the city (number 34, about 1530) and a Catholic chapel hidden behind a house front, which is what Catholic worship had to look like here after 1578.
Then the Oude Kerk, the oldest building in Amsterdam (1306), with Saskia Rembrandt buried under the floor and the red-light windows pressed right up against its walls — Amsterdam's whole moral arrangement in one block. Out along the Zeedijk, the old sea wall that is now Chinatown, past the Nieuwmarkt and the Waag, and west through the Jordaan to the hotel. Lock the bikes somewhere lit.
This is the payoff for keeping the bikes. The canal ring is a loop, the quays have lanes, and at dusk with the installations just lit it is the best hour the city offers in winter. Lock both wheels when you stop; bike theft is the one Amsterdam risk that is real. Back to the hotel to shower, out again to dinner.
The Jordaan's Italian institution since 1985: a long, loud room with the kitchen open at the back, the menu written daily, and cooking that is regional rather than generic — a proper Tuscan ribollita or a Piedmontese vitello tonnato depending on what came in, handmade pasta, whole fish, and a wine list that goes region by region. It is where the Jordaan goes on a Saturday. Book by phone.
No tickets, no clock. A slow breakfast, the canal ring on bikes while the light is good, the Spiegelkwartier and the Nine Streets after, the Jordaan at dusk, and a Dutch dinner eight minutes from the door.
Sunday is the day for the hotel's own breakfast, served in the room with the beams and the dark walls, and a look at the garden before anyone else is in it. Nothing starts before you have finished.
You have ridden the ring lit; now ride it in the grey morning light, which is when the houses are legible. South down the Keizersgracht to where it meets the Amstel, left along the river to the Magere Brug — the Skinny Bridge, a wooden double-draw of 1934 on the site of a 1691 one, still opened by hand — and back north up the Prinsengracht, the outer canal, the one with the houseboats and the Westerkerk tower at the end of it. Stop wherever a gable asks you to. The Reguliersgracht, crossing the ring on your way south, is the seven-bridges view from the banner at the top of this page; from the Herengracht bridge you can see all seven at once.
The Rijksmuseum's axis runs straight up the Spiegelgracht into the Spiegelkwartier, seventy antique dealers and galleries in two streets — Delft, Asian ceramics, old maps, tribal art, mostly open Sunday afternoons — and out onto the Herengracht at the Gouden Bocht, where the double-width houses of the 1660s are. The Kattenkabinet at Herengracht 497 is the only one of them you can go into, and it is a museum of cat paintings in a merchant's house, which is more interesting than it sounds because of the house.
Nine short streets crossing the three canals, named for the trades that were there — Berenstraat, Wolvenstraat, Huidenstraat, Reestraat: bears, wolves, hides, roe deer, the tanners and furriers of the 1600s. Now the city's best small shops: Mendo on the Berenstraat for books, Pompadour on the Huidenstraat for chocolates and a tearoom, and lunch wherever a window seat is free. On a Sunday it is full by two; be there by half past one.
Start at the Westerkerk — Hendrick de Keyser again, 1631, Rembrandt buried somewhere inside in a pauper's grave nobody can find, the tower with the Habsburg crown on top that the hotel's windows look at. Then the two prettiest canals in the city, the Bloemgracht and the Egelantiersgracht, and the hofjes: almshouse courtyards behind plain doors, built by rich widows for poor ones. The Sint-Andrieshofje at Egelantiersgracht 107 (1617) is open to walk into through a blue-tiled passage; the Karthuizerhof on the Karthuizersstraat is the biggest. Finish on the Brouwersgracht, the brewers' canal, as the light goes and the festival comes on, and you are three minutes from the hotel.
Saturday was the ring on bikes; Sunday is the rest of it — the Amstel end, the bridges, whatever the new route runs past this year — and then back to the bar for an hour before dinner. Bikes back to the desk tonight.
"Mothers": every wall covered in photographs of regulars' mothers (bring one of yours and it goes up), the crockery deliberately mismatched because that is what a Dutch kitchen looks like, and the food the Dutch actually eat at home on a cold night. Stamppot — potato mashed with kale or endive or sauerkraut, a rookworst on top and a well of gravy — sudderlapjes, beef stewed for hours, erwtensoep, the pea soup a spoon stands up in, and the Hollandse rijsttafel, their own joke: a tasting of all of it on one plate, which is the thing to order. Apple pie or wentelteefjes to finish. Loud, warm, cheap, and the right last night. Book by phone or on their site.
Out by seven. Breakfast starts at half past seven on weekdays, so it does not exist for you; the hotel will do coffee and the station has the rest.
The same walk as Friday in reverse, and empty at that hour; a taxi is the lazy, correct option with bags.
Three things worth knowing
Why the houses lean, and why they have hooks
Everything in the centre stands on wooden piles driven through peat and clay into the first sand layer, ten to twelve metres down; the Royal Palace on the Dam sits on 13,659 of them. Piles rot when the water table drops and the tops dry, so houses settle unevenly and lean into each other — and some were built leaning forward on purpose. The hoist beam under nearly every gable is the reason: staircases are too narrow to move anything, so furniture goes up the outside on a rope, and a façade tilted a few degrees forward keeps the load clear of the windows. The gable above it — stepped, bell, neck — is the marker running down the side of this document, and it was the owner's signature long before house numbers existed.
The three canals you cycle along — Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Prinsengracht — were dug as a single planned expansion from 1613, a grachtengordel that quadrupled the city in a generation. Plot widths were fixed and taxed on frontage, which is why the houses are narrow and deep and why the Golden Bend's double plots were a statement. The whole ring has been a World Heritage site since 2010.
Riding here, in two rules
Red asphalt is yours. Stay right, signal turns with a hand, and expect the people around you to move faster and closer than a Paris cycle lane has taught you; they are commuting, not sightseeing. Trams have absolute priority, and their rails will take a front wheel if you cross them at a shallow angle — cross at ninety degrees, every time. Lights on after dark are enforced, and the fines run to €140–160; check the rental has a working front and rear before you leave with it.
The hotel's bikes: every listing says Canal House rents them, and an older write-up says they once pointed guests to MacBike instead. Treat it as likely until the desk confirms it, and MacBike opposite Centraal — city bike about €12–16 a day, photo ID and a card — is the fallback from nine on Saturday.
What you are eating, in the right words
Rijsttafel — "rice table" — is not Indonesian; it is Dutch-colonial, a planters' banquet assembled in the East Indies from dozens of regional dishes and brought home to Amsterdam after independence in 1949, when the city filled with repatriates. Indonesia itself barely serves it. Haring is herring, lightly brined, eaten with raw onion and gherkin, held by the tail if you want to look local. Stroopwafel is two thin waffle discs with caramel syrup between, invented in Gouda, and only worth it hot from the iron. Bitterballen are the fried ragout balls that arrive with the first beer and should. And jenever — the malt-wine spirit gin was a bad English copy of — comes jong or oud, in a tulip glass filled to the brim, and the first sip is taken bending to the glass, not lifting it.
If something gives
- Rain all day. Saturday: the museum does not change; swap the old-city ride for the Stedelijk next door. Sunday: this is the one case for the Rijksmuseum — €25, timed, de Kooning included — or the Kattenkabinet and the Spiegelkwartier dealers if you are holding the line on one museum. Go out for the lights anyway — they are better wet.
- No hotel bikes. MacBike, Stationsplein, from nine. Twenty minutes lost; nothing else moves.
- Friday's table is full everywhere. Moeders a day early (open every night), then the hotel's own takeaway list brought to the room on a china plate, which is a legitimate Friday.
- Toscanini or Moeders is full. Dutch & Beyond (Leidsekruisstraat 23, 020 320 7177, Sunday to 23:00) is the other Dutch kitchen worth the walk — a three-course set for about €26, next door to The Pantry, which has the queue. Bussia on the Reestraat (Piedmontese, 4 minutes from the hotel, 020 627 8794) is the Italian fallback.
Four bookings, then nothing to arrange
The Van Gogh Museum, Saturday 10:30 — online, timed, and not sold at the door. Friday's rijsttafel, Toscanini on Saturday and Moeders on Sunday, all by phone. And a line to the hotel to hold two bikes from Saturday morning to Sunday night.
The Light Festival from the quays, the Noordermarkt, the Albert Cuyp, the Vondelpark, the Begijnhof, the hofjes, the Nine Streets. The only entry fee in the whole weekend is the one museum.