Weekend in Amsterdam

We left for a weekend in Naples (to visit Pompeii ) only to get stuck on the highway near the airport for over an hour and a half. We missed our flight, and while I was actually looking forward to a relaxing unscheduled weekend at home, my DH was bound and determined to get out of town.

At the airport we debated between Madrid, Venice, Rome and Amsterdam, and settled on the latter. Amsterdam is a city where my DH spent a nice vacation with his ex-wife, and he felt weird planning a weekend for us there, so a last-minute pick was a good solution. It's also a good size city for a weekend.

It was nice because we did a ton of walking around - and even though it was rainy, it wasn't too cold, so it was pleasant.

We visited two museums - the Anne Frank house, and then on Saturday I went to the Van Gogh museum alone while my DH & DSS went wandering about. Both were interesting, but the Van Gogh was really nice in that it showed the artist's evolution over time. Like the Picasso museum, the evolution context was more powerful than any single painting - none of his best works were present. It's always good for my spirit to spend a few hours seeing art, and I need to make sure to do it more often.

We also had some good food (and some bad). We went to a nice "traditional Dutch, updated" restaurant which was more to my DH's tastes than mine (lots of game, pork, etc). I had a split pea soup w a pork and sauerkraut square in it. Followed by scallops with lobster. We didn't take dessert because it was late and my DSS was getting difficult.

On Saturday night we went to an Indonesian restaurant, what had filled my mind as soon as we'd settled on Amsterdam, as I had good memories of this from prior trips to Amsterdam. My DH, however, was skeptical, telling me he hadn't liked the food in Indonesia when he'd traveled there, etc. He was game to try (and I was clearly really wanting it) and the hotel told us they'd booked one of the better ones in town. It was really good and pretty much how I remembered it - lots of little dishes on a warmer w some rice, rather spicy and clearly Asian but different than Chinese, Japanese or Indian.