After almost three months on the road, I was craving an easy, low-key weekend of cosy conviviality. In Amsterdam, I wanted to walk along the canals, admire the well-kept Golden Age edifices and investigate some of the city's smaller museums. Late nights, parties, transformative experiences — not what I wanted. Frugal relaxation in one of the most pleasant cities in the world — that would be the ticket.
I hired an apartment which was not only directly in the centre but in the Nine Streets, built in the 17th century to accommodate Amsterdam's growing population and prosperity. Outside, I felt like a country bumpkin on his first trip to the big city, gawking at everything from the tall, narrow buildings in the 17th-century style of Philips Vingboons in the 17th century to the tall, pretty girls riding bicycles.
I managed to get in a nice, slow morning at Lust, a cafe, one canal away from my apartment. Inside were chandeliers and buttoned red-leather panels on the walls, but I sat outside on the sidewalk, lingering for hours over a platter of garlicky sausages, French fries and salad, watching the neighbourhood go by.
If I didn't find exceptional meals, I did at least find exceptional museums (though I didn't invest in the 35 euro Museumkaart, which offers one year's free admission to museums throughout the Netherlands).
The National Museum of Spectacles displayed scores of specimens from the past 400 years, from the pince-nez and lorgnettes, to protective glasses for riding trains. De Appel, a contemporary art space that opens free the first Sunday of every month, had an intriguing installation by the French-British artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz, whose quirky "rooms" I can't possibly describe in a single sentence.
And at Foam, a photography museum, I not only found an exhibition of one of my favourite portraitists, the Malian Malick Sidibé, but also discovered the Dutch photographer Kors van Bennekom, whose affectionate black-and-white pictures of his wife, children and friends — often in domestic or vacation scenes, and frequently naked — filled me with good feeling.
Finally, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I wound up at the Special Collections branch of the University of Amsterdam library. There, on display at no cost, was the Atlas Maior, the unparalleled, unprecedented mapping of the world, published here in Amsterdam in 1662. The exhibition itself traced the history of mapmaking, from a 13th-century scroll-style map of the Roman Empire to a surprisingly accurate 15th-century map of the world — surprisingly accurate but for the absence of the New World and the transposition of north and south.
As I walked from map to map, from Terra Incognita and marvellous sea monsters into a New World of wealth, travel and scientific rigour, I was retracing the steps of my own journeys. There were Paris and Malta, along with Samaria and Moldavia, which together would become Romania, and a land called Silesia that stretched almost to Gdansk.
When I reached the multivolume Atlas Maior itself, I thought about how the Grand Tourists before me, those rich young Englishmen preparing to soak in the cultural treasures of Europe, had most likely spent hours flipping through the pages of this very book, wondering how they might get from Calais to Paris to Rome and beyond.
But a map is only inspiration — it can tell you where to go, but not what happens when you get there. Those proto-tourists could not have foreseen where their Grand Tour would take them, just as I never predicted that I would wind up here in Amsterdam
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