Amsterdam adventures: Day 1
It may not exactly be an advertising-related trip but I recently had a short break in Amsterdam. With its chilled out atmosphere and historic and cultural attractions, it ended up being a really great trip and so I wanted to document my trip to have something to read back on in the future.
I went for three whole days and three nights with a friend from uni, and we had a great time even though we were pretty much exhausted after walking altogether over 22 miles that weekend!
After getting off the plane our first stop was the hotel we were staying in on Overtoom 57, it was pretty accessible to the rest of the city, especially to most of the museums and galleries, with Museumplein being less than 10 minutes walk and right outside the hotel was a number 1 tram line that took you right into the center of the city in less than 15 minutes. After dropping off our bags and refreshing ourselves after having woken up at 2:30am that morning we went out in search for brunch. Seeing as it was our first time in Amsterdam I’d searched a few different places before the trip and found a great place for pancakes.
Mook Pancakes has two cafes in the city with one being west and the other more east nearer to the cities botanical gardens. It is an Instagrammers dream, inside the cafe it very minimal with a whole wall at the back of the cafe covered with potted plants and succulents! If you get a chance you should definitely check out some of their other tagged pictures on social media. As for the pancakes they were delicious! In Amsterdam pancakes are more like Britains drop scones or like American pancakes, they aren’t like crepes, therefore, they were very filling.
After our brunch, we decided to have a little walk around the city and along some of the infamous canals. It was very warm and we learnt very quickly that there isn’t much shade along Amsterdam canals but we got many nice pictures of typical Amsterdam canal houses and even a few canal boats.
In the end, we ended up walking all the way around to Museumplein where we visited the Moco Museum. This was one of the main places I wanted to visit whilst in Amsterdam having seen the Banksy exhibition advertised for ages. It was also a nice surprise to see that the other artist shown in the gallery was Roy Lichenstein. The museums had created a 3D Roy Lichenstein experience based around Van Gogh’s painting ‘Bedroom in Arles’ in the famous Pop Art style.
After the Moco Museum we decided to sit down for a bit in the Museumplein park before heading back to the hotel through Vondelpark. We were pretty tired so we decided to relax for a bit before heading out later in the evening to find a free canal cruise that was included with our iAmsterdam cards.
We ended up trying two different canal companies around Leidesplein before then heading across the city on the tram to Centraal Station where one company runs regular circular cruises showing over 100 attractions around Amsterdam. Seeing as it was a nice day we did end up waiting around 45 minutes in a queue until we were able to get on board one of the cruises but after we did we had a pleasant hour cruising through Amsterdam seeing the sites!
And so that was the end of Day 1, we ended the night with a Dominoes watching Eurovision in our hotel room. It wasn’t very adventurous of us and not very Dutch but we’d had a tiring day and wanted to relax before another busy day the next day!
To see more of what I got up to keep a look out for my next blog but also check out my Instagram highlights for my Amsterdam story!
#amsterdamblog #citybreak #museumplein #amsterdam #mocomuseum #netherlands #travelblog #adventure #advertising