We started the next day by getting on a bus for the Museumplein (Museum Square), a large grassy area with cultural venues (mainly museums) scattered around its perimeter. The Museumplein is located well southwest of the city center, and the bus was a great time-saver, compared to walking. Two museums in the area were the two places we most wanted to visit in Amsterdam – the Rijksmuseum, or "State Museum", and the Van Gogh Museum, or "Van Gogh Museum". Both museums are very popular, so we'd already gotten tickets online (from www.rijksmuseum.nl and www.vangoghmuseum.com). Photography is forbidden in both museums, so I apologize for the quality of the pictures appearing below. They should give you some idea of what there is to see at these fine museums, but please visit the museums' respective websites for a more complete and high-quality look at their collections.

Our first stop was the Van Gogh Museum, housed in a building dating to 1973.

The museum has the world's largest collection of works by Vincent van Gogh, so if you're a van Gogh fan, you should have a fine time visiting the place (though it can be crowded). There are also works by some of van Gogh's contemporaries, some of whom were obvious influences on him. Van Gogh, of course, was the troubled Dutch-born painter (he was confined to lunatic asylums twice) who produced a huge volume of amazing paintings between 1885 (his first recognized masterpiece was The Potato Eaters, completed in that year) and 1890, when he died of complications from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. The museum has 200 of his paintings and 400 of his drawings, as well as 700 letters written by him. Here are some paintings:




The Rijksmuseum was founded in The Hague in 1800, and its collection moved around between The Hague, Amsterdam and Haarlem (Louis Bonaparte, briefly installed as king by his brother Napoleon, ordered the first move to Amsterdam in 1808) until the current building was completed in 1885.

The Rijksmuseum collection is gigantic, consisting of one million art and historical objects (dated from 1200-2000), 8000 of which are on display. During our visit the main building was near the end of a nearly ten-year renovation project, but an exhibition of museum highlights was open to the public in a smaller building to the southwest of the main building, known as the south wing. Here are some of the 17th Century works that were on display:



From the Museumplein we walked back northward. We walked by a canal and decided it would be fun to ride on one of the low, glassed-in tour boats we'd seen gliding up and down the canals. We followed the canal until it led us to a landing for one of these boats. We paid our money and climbed aboard.