Amsterdam again

Taking the train in to Amsterdam for the afternoon is just as cool as it sounds!

This time our wanderings were closer to the station and Kalverstraat.

Don't miss how slanted the building in the photograph on the right is.

We passed the old Beurs (Bourse) which is now used as a concert hall: a beautiful building, which now displays old and new, then and now, with style.

The Dam Square area may be the most imposing part of a city which has very many stunning buildings.

Kalverstraat is packed with shoppers as we wend our way to a small church that you could easily miss amid the stores. As I do (it's closed anyway).

We walked through a gallery of the Amsterdam Historical Museum to get to Begijnhof. They have converted the space between two buildings into a long corridor gallery for these huge paintings of municipal groups--an older version of the office photograph, I guess. The paintings are neat--we saw one in the Prinsenhof that was priceless, with a large group of officials, each pointing to another as if to shift blame. How many organizations do we know like that, eh? I also want to say how much I appreciated such a use of space that might elsewhere have become a garbage alley or spitting ground.

The seals on the wall on the right are in the place of nameplates next to doorbells. Very fancy, I think!

And so we turn into the Begijnhof, which is like a secret garden. Now, not such a well-kept secret it was a Catholic refuge in earlier times. Today, single women live here and if you discount tourist intrusions like ours, I am sure it is a refuge to them in many ways as well.

One comes out of the Begijnhof into the Amsterdam Art Market.

And so our sightseeing for the afternoon wound down....