I took this photo at the Flower Market. They are little houses, like magnets. My favorites are the Flower Market in the center, the Bier Cafe, the Klompen [wooden shoe shop], the Dutch Rock Cafe, and the Hotel Rembrandt. I thought it was interesting because they have the different types of roofs on the houses you see there. There’s the headless neck gable on the tattoo shop, the step gable on the Flower Market, and the flat roof on the Bier Cafe. And you can kind of see the hooks they have for bringing furniture in through the windows because the staircases are too small.

I also like the tiny people sitting in front of the cafe and beer place, which was kind of like what we saw the people do there.

All of them are pretty typical things you’d find in Amsterdam. You’d definitely find a lot of coffee shops, flower markets, and beer places and cafes. And the Klompen are like tourist shops that you definitely see a lot of. The Klompen, they don’t really wear them, but they’re good souvenirs. I actually sat in a big one of those. That was funny!

Most museum-loving tourists who visit Amsterdam usually head straight to the Rijksmuseum or the Van Gogh Museum. But an American ex-pat living in Amsterdam we knew told us to go to the Canal House Museum first. We did, and it was a pleasant surprise. The museum is inside a 17th Century canal house facing the Herengracht canal. Once inside, you are guided from room to room, where models, projections, and narrated voice-overs explain why and when the city built the canals, how they built houses along them, and a bit about the architecture and different roof gables that The Kid mentioned in her photo. It was totally fascinating, and a great introduction to the city.

This is a detail of a large diorama of the city in one of the rooms during the tour. A colored light show in the room revealed how the city expanded the canals over time. We were able to walk all around this miniature model of the city, taking in all the details, from the different gables, to the cars and canal boats. It reminded me of a small set of European block houses I had as a kid, but much more complete!

I took this photo in Amsterdam, in the Jordaan neighborhood. It’s upside down feet sticking up from the back terrace! Ha ha ha ha ha! It’s funny because who puts feet on their back terrace? I mean, it’s just very silly. And it’s in one of the modern buildings. I think that’s pretty cool, because how often do you see feet sticking up from a back terrace?

Those funny mannequin legs sticking up in the terrace in The Kid’s photo reminded me of some of the public art we saw in Vondelpark. It’s the largest park in Amsterdam and it’s like Prospect Park in Brooklyn — sprawling and easy going. There’s lots of kid friendly art scattered around the park, and when we saw this sculpture of the clown doing a handstand, The Kid ran right up to it, and decided to do her best imitation.

This photo shows an Ice Cream tulip. It looks like a pink bowl with a heap of vanilla ice cream on top, though it is a flower. I was wondering how it could be so different from all the other tulips, because they all usually have the same shape, and this stuck out from the others because it was such a weird shape. The flower market was pretty big, and this was not the only flower vendor in the market. There were a lot of people there, especially tourists. We were there not only to enjoy looking at the flowers, but also to get a present for my Nana that we could ship back to America, because she has a garden and loves flowers.

The flower market in Amsterdam is one of its biggest tourist attractions. Everyone comes to gawk at the many colors and varieties of tulips, long associated with The Netherlands. Back in the height of the “tulip mania” in the 1630s, tulip bulbs were so prized that they were even traded like currency or futures, until the market for them crashed. When I noticed some tulip bulbs in the market sold with a portrait of Rembrandt van Rijn, one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age of painting, I groaned. But later that same day we went to the Rembrandt House museum, and I was reminded of Rembrandt’s own rise and fall (he went bankrupt in the 1650s). Then I remembered how Rembrandt and his family helped find creative ways for him to earn money in his later years. It made me realize that if licensing his own image existed back then, Rembrandt probably would have done it.

I didn’t realize why the bike had so many toys on it, until I looked behind me and saw the toy store. It’s not unusual to see bikes in Amsterdam, but a plastic duck, riding a bike, covered in toys, dragging a flower pot? I mean, how often do you see that? Also, I thought the little yellow footprints were cute.

This was my first visit to Amsterdam, and I was struck by how old the houses and canals were. And basically, the Dutch keep whatever works, regardless of how quirky it is. That certainly holds true with the bicycles and the cars too. While most other tourists fixate on the bicycles, I couldn’t help noticing the weird and old cars. This photo shows one of the smallest cars I’ve ever seen. It’s a Spykstaal, a Dutch-made service vehicle that looks like a toy, but it really runs (I saw one of them being driven around very slowly by a couple that just barely fit inside it). After I noticed some other odd cars, I turned it into a game for us to spot them wherever we could.