Amsterdam Museum Day

16 January 2014

My sneakers chose this day to die, both shoes having come unglued enough at the toes to kick up sidewalk rain water and project it straight back onto the top of my shoes, sending the Amsterdam rain directly to my socks.  The insoles have quit too.  This is where Amazon Prime becomes a good deal.  I'll have new sneakers at my doorstep when we get home on Saturday.

Jack and I are in the hotel room drying out and chilling out.  The rain is petering out.

Today we were mostly inside, spending our time in the newly opened* Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum.  I have now seen enough Dutch art to get me through the remainder of the decade.  I might now even be able to identify a Dutch painting from 50 paces.  I also appreciate Van Gogh more after seeing so much of his work (none of which was any of the paintings everyone knows; those are scattered all over the rest of the world).

In the early evening we went to a small bar, a "brown cafe," named for the smoke-stained walls.  No, not that kind of smoke, and not that kind of cafe.  This was a bar, a neighborhood bar, that opened at 4:00 p.m. We arrived shortly after it opened.  Within ten minutes the place was nearly full.

The reason we went to the Wellington is that Jack had read it has a friendly cat.  We needed a cat.  We saw the cat, named "Puss," as soon as we walked in.  She submitted herself to some cat-starved rubbing, then strutted to the back of the bar, where all I could do was talk to her, photograph her, and get a few more rubs in before she wandered off to the kitchen.

Around 5:00 p.m. the sky began to clear.  There was enough light to take pictures of some more bikes,

and to get a quick picture of an orange kitty who wandered into the frame:

We walked through a small park as the sun went down:

Maybe tomorrow I'll get pictures of the city.

(*I wanted the hyphen there, too, Jim, but Jack says I don't need it after an -ly adverb.)