Today, we have a reserved time slot at the Van Gogh Museum for 9 a.m. Our apartment is in the Jordan section of Amsterdam. It takes us about 20 minutes to take the tram to the Van Gogh, which is right next door to the Rijksmuseum.

The first floor of the museum is all self portraits. We saw a special exhibit on the influence of Japanese artists on Van Gogh. He was a collector of Japanese prints. He collected them not for resale, but to study and learn from them, pinned up in his studio.

Then lunch on the patio of the Stedelijk modern museum where we enjoyed mustard soup, lobster croquettes, beet salad, corn chowder and a french Rose’. Inside, we viewed exhibits featuring works by many of the moderns such as Modrian, Picasso, Rothko, De Kooning, and Matisse. The museum displayed a replica of the work of Gerrit Reiteld, Dutch architect and furniture designer, who designed the Reiteld- Schroeder house in the style De Stijl.

Next, hopped on a tram to the Central station and followed the Rick Steves audio tour of Old Amsterdam. Imagined the main square of old Amsterdam, Dam Square, as it must have been during the Golden Age with the world’s first stock exchange, walking the street that was a river bed in the 1660’s.

We took brief trek through the red light district and the rows of coffee houses and then trammed home to our apartment in the Jordan district where we strolled in the warm night air and enjoyed fabulous wood-fired pizza from a local pizzeria named La Perla.