I hate transfers. That is, the time spent getting from one place to another. Packing. Taxis. Traffic anxiety. Airport. Security. Gate changes. Delayed flights. Airplane seats designed by little people for little people. Circling airports. Passport control. Taxi to hotel. Sullen desk clerks. Room not ready. Unpacking. Jet lag. What’s to like? I’m not a control freak -I’m not!- but to be at the mercy of the rules and needs of others is maddening.

We were eager to get on to Amsterdam, but our train from Paris was retarde - delayed. We looked around for a place to wait. This was Gare du Nord, one of France’s busiest railway stations and terminus of the Eurostar train between Paris and London. I didn’t want to spend one minute more than necessary there. News reports had led me to believe that the it was a hellstorm of ethnic riots, pickpockets, and roaming gangs of thieves. We had hidden our credit cards, passports, and cash so far away that rampaging villains would have to carve several layers of clothing from our bodies. As it happened, the station was like any other - noisy, busy, milling, confusing, but hardly threatening.

The train wasn’t even that late - thirty minutes. We located our seats, way, way down at the end. Legroom was similar to coach on a plane, perhaps a touch roomier. Cheap, though, at €39 each, one-way, nonexchangeable and nonrefundable. Sandwiches from the bar car. The uneventful trip took four hours and 25 minutes, as scheduled.

At Station Centraal in Amsterdam, we snagged a cab easily enough, and after a couple of wrong turns were deposited at the address given us by the owner of the apartment we had rented in advance online. It was incorrect - 149 Bilderdijkstraat. No one to meet us. We stood on the corner, bags and all, looking up one street, down another, waiting for someone we didn’t know in a vehicle that could have been anything from a bicycle to a bus.  People took pity on us, stopping to ask if they could help us. They couldn’t.

Finally, after 90 minutes, we got a text on our world phone. We weren’t even certain it was working. Connection was made. Dirk, the other half of the couple who owned the apartment, eventually picked us up and drove us around the corner. It was at 178 Kinkerstraat, which his partner Marijn had helpfully informed us in an earlier e-mail was “close to number 180.”

STAYING

Dutch houses are known for their very steep stairs; #178 didn’t disappoint. It was a bear getting our luggage up to the second floor, and we make a point of packing light. But we made it. The flat was long and narrow. In the front, it looked down on Kinkerstraat and its steady stream of trams, cars, buses, scooters, and relentless blizzards of bicycles. An alcove at back took in a view of what might have once been a garden, but was now merely overgrown. A queen bed filled the space, wall to wall. At 6′2″, the top of my head brushed one wall, my toes the one opposite. As the designated inside sleeper, and prone to early morning bathroom visits, I would somehow have to crawl over Jo without waking her.

Said bathroom had a marble floor shaped like the floor of a shower stall. That is to say, it was the floor of the shower, sharing space with the toilet and the sink. We could only hope that the drain was efficient. The adjacent kitchen and its equipment were basic, but with only three and a half days in town, we planned no cooking. The rest of the furnishings were Dorm Room Basic, including three milk crates for tables, a nearly floor-level sofa, and a mid-size TV. (In The Netherlands, most entertainment shows are British and American and are shown in the original languages, with subtitles. Before our stay was over, we saw reruns of Friends, Will & Grace, and Everyone Loves Raymond.)

We went out to pick up wine, water, and soap after an exploratory stroll around the neighborhood. It was not promising. Called Oud West - Old West - it could charitably be described as frowsy, even bleak. The sidewalks were lined with locksmiths, hardware stores, and fly-specked pizza joints. I had misjudged this for an up-and-coming district, whereas it was mostly just gone, vague in identity and purpose.

At least the flat was cheap, by current standards and the bottoming dollar, renting for €360 for four nights, about half what a three-star hotel would cost.

GETTING AROUND

There were frequent trams passing by the nearest corner, getting us out of Oud West to more agreeable precincts. Jo was determined to get a handle on the transit system. She discovered that a strip card of fifteen tickets cost only €7, a big reduction over the  €1.60 individual tickets sold on the tram. They are available at supermarkets and some tobacconists. Enter the tram through the door down toward the back. A conductor sits in a booth there. Present your ticket and he/she stamps it. They’re good for directions, too. Most attractions and desirable neighborhoods are within 20-30 minutes of the Station Centraal, the main transit hub.

Near the station are the piers that serve as home base for the several canal boat tours that circle the city, stopping at major sites where passengers can hop off for visits, then board the next boat in the same line to continue. There are a variety of itineraries available, most taking one to two hours. The one we chose cost €20 each, and amounted to a 24-hour pass. The boat edged out into the harbor for a few minutes, then entered one of several horseshoe-shaped canals that surround the ancient city center.

There are 252 bridges in the historic core of the city. Most of the inner city canals are lined with houseboats, hundreds of them. Over 2,500 have gas and electricity. Among the several additional forms of waterborne traffic are water taxis, barges, kayaks, and “canal bikes” - self-propelled paddleboats, which can be rented at many of the same places where tourboats dock.

SEEING

This was a four-day side trip after two weeks in Paris. Which is not to say that our short visit came close to exhausting the possibilities of this northern Venice. First on most everyone’s list is Anne Frankhuis, (Prinsengracht 263, at Westermarkt), where the 13-year-old Jewish girl and her family hid from the Nazis for over two years. The reason for its tragic fame, of course, is the diary the remarkably literate Anne kept, illuminated by both her obviously keen intellect and her buoyant optimism in the face of their constant fear of discovery. They lived in silence during the day, not daring to use the sink or toilet, whispering, reading. At night, still careful not to cause sharp sounds, they cooked and ate and studied, all in the same room. A moveable bookcase was built to cover the only entrance. The carefully managed present exploration of the site avoids sentimentality, given the subject, at least, and the experience is even more poignant for that.

On August 4, 1944 the hideaway was discovered by the German Security Police. The eight people inside were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Only Anne’s father Otto survived. He published her diary and worked to make this museum of their secret annex.

Tickets aren’t difficult to obtain and aren’t too expensive - €9 for adults. The waiting lines are the problem, up to two hours in summer when tickets are purchased at the site. Avoid them by going to www.annefrank.org to buy tickets online; you can even select your own date and time. Print them out and when you arrive at the house you can enter immediately through a special door to the left of the main entrance.

After the Frank House, we wandered into adjacent Jordaan, a former working-class district west of center city recently going through gentrification. We had read and been told that its narrow streets were full of quirky shops, cafés, galleries, bars, but after several turns and many blocks, we found ourselves underwhelmed. Finally, in a long, empty square, we decided on lunch at a corner café called De Blaffende Vis (Westerstraat 118). It was unremarkable, but the day’s tomato soup was good, as were our sandwiches - tuna melt on ciabatta and a BLT on thick chewy whole wheat - for €22.60. Nobody I’d noticed left a tip, so I just dropped a few small coins.

Around 4:30, we took tram #13 to Museumplein, a broad greensward so named because of the presence at its edges of the Rhyksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum. We had pre-paid tickets for the Van Gogh, so we headed across the park toward the contemporary building over at the far left corner. Along the way, we encountered several of the painted elephants we’d already seen by the dozens around the city. We never did find out their purpose nor how long they’d been around.

Our capacity for cultural events or experiences - concerts, art exhibitions, plays - is about one hour each, exceptions extended for the Louvre, New York Philharmonic, and the like. With only about 45 minutes to take in the Van Gogh until closing, that was about right.

There are more than 200 paintings inside, but given how prolific the Earless One was, that leaves hundreds scattered around the world, including most of his best-known canvases. These are supplemented by works of many of his 19th century contemporaries, including Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Van Gogh’s sometime buddy, Gauguin.

Vincent’s story is told sequentially, with biographical notes on the walls (in English) and drawings and paintings relevant to each of his creative periods. A worthwhile time, and we could have used another half hour.The Van Gogh Museum is at Aj Amsterdam 1070. Adults€12.50. Purchase tickets in advance at www.vangoghmuseum.com.  Open daily.

The big-deal art repository is the 1885 Rijksmuseum (Jan Luykenstraat 1, www.rijksmuseum.ni). A very substantial structure in what can be described as a ponderous Dutch Renaissance-Gothic-Romanesque-Revival style, it was reaching the end of a years-long renovation when we were there. Much of the building was closed off, but that turned out to be an advantage. Many of its most iconic works had been moved for viewing into one wing, including Vermeer’s luminous The Kitchen Maid and Rembrandt’s magnificent Night Watch, and many other works by those masters. Given our acknowledged short attention span, that was a perfect arrangement. After an unusually strict security check, we were in, around, and out in an hour, filled to the visual brim. The entire museum is open now. Open daily. Adults €11.

Afterwards, we drifted from highbrow to low, walking in a generally northerly direction from the plush, park-rich precinct of the Rijksmuseum toward Centrum, the oldest part of the city. Buildings transitioned from large and attached to those closer and smaller to packed in close, occasionally making room for broad plazas like the Dam and Nieuwmarkt. In total, we probably didn’t go farther than four miles, but it felt longer.

We looked around for a place to stop. The herring place I’d read about near the flower market was gone, but the salads we saw on tables a few cafés back looked good, so we returned there. The only open table outside was next to a group of five British tourists, all men in their thirties or forties. They wore garments attesting to their athletic loyalties. One of them had mastered the art of using the f-word and its derivatives as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and general linguistic connective tissue.  He deployed this skill in loud, nearly continuous utterances of his views of the world, possibly unaware that virtually everyone within earshot spoke English.

Eventually they left, to our relief that not all buffoonish, clueless tourists are Americans. The salads, it turned out, weren’t very good, either, so you might wish to avoid Bierencafe de Beiaard at Spui 30.

Apart from mere curiosity, window-shopping, poking into off-street nooks and alleys, detouring through university campuses, we planned a late dinner at a place undetermined near Amsterdam’s famed Red Light District. Looming in the middle of Nieumarkt square was a massive pile with conical turrets, once a gate to the city during the Middle Ages.  Now it is a restaurant, de Waag, # 4.  Scores of tables sprawled out into the plaza, and we might have been better off ordering a beer and a sandwich out there. We went inside, a beamed, vaulted space atmospheric enough to seem promising. Giant wooden chandeliers hung over heavy plank tables, which, even at that dinner hour, were at least half empty. Despite all those vacant chairs, the hostess shunted us to the bar. A half hour later, we were seated. Fifteen minutes later, we were presented menus. Forty minutes after that, we received our appetizers. And so forth.  The food wasn’t bad, simply uninspired. Dinner cost €91.75, and you might want to avoid this one, too.

A short stroll down the street behind de Waag introduces the Red Light District - a.k.a. RLD.  Prostitution is legal in The Netherlands (as are marijuana and hashish), no more obviously so here in this warren of streets. The needless-to-say scantily clad women placing themselves on offer stand behind neon-lighted windows, which they often tap with a knuckle unnecessarily seeking to draw attention. Beds are prominently placed in the rooms behind them, with curtains for the windows when a price has been agreed upon and the resultant business is being conducted.

All that aside, the experience leans more toward naughty than sleazy, at least for those viewers who share the live-and-let-live tolerances of the liberal Dutch. Taking photographs is forbidden, enforced by both city police and private guards, which, of course, doesn’t stop gazers with cameras. Jo grew uninterested in RLD sooner than I did.

Another day, we found ourselves in the Dam, at the center of the historic core, the wide plaza named for the dam erected there in the 13th Century. That important footnote aside, it isn’t an especially compelling space, and we decided to seek out the legendary Café Luxembourg on Spui square. After a few wrong turns, we located the upper end of Spuistraat. It immediately announced itself as radical-rebel-anti-establishment land, with a few grungy galleries, hole-in-the-wall performance spaces, and huge graffiti murals covering entire building facades. It is the Sixties revisited, right down to the “Police Are Pigs!” proclamations. Ah, to be young and so very, very certain.

After a block or two, signs of gentrification set in. Graffiti fades, then disappears. Numbers of tony little boutiques and restaurants multiply.  Finally on the right is the yellow awning of Café Luxembourg, Spui 24.  We grab a table in front. Spui is delightful: A couple of old cafés spill tables out onto the sidewalks. A newsstand across the way has dozens of foreign publications. A shop sells rare books. There are benches around a statue in the center of a little Dutch boy (they don’t have too many generals to brag about). Beyond those is an open area dominated by a small church where a tented market of books and prints is conducted on Fridays. We have Coke Lights and grilled cheese sandwiches, a favorite Dutch snack, and dawdle for an hour.

It is only when we get up to leave that we discover we have been sitting not at Café Luxembourg, but at the adjoining Café Hoppe.

EATING

We weren’t in Amsterdam for the food, and the dinner at de Waag (see above) didn’t stir hopes for memorability to come. But one of my persistent memories of the city was of rijsttafel, an import from the Dutch colonies that eventually came to form Indonesia. It is based upon rice, with anywhere from a few platters of meat, fish, and vegetables up to the grand 23-dish extravaganza on offer at Sama Sebo (P.C. Hoofstraat 27, www.samasebo.nl) a couple of blocks from the Rijksmuseum. Inside, it looked more like an English pub than something out of the Far East, and the waiters were all middle-aged white Dutchmen. They were, however, most congenial and helpful in explaining the ritual and compositions of the food to come…and come.

There were several modified versions of rijsttafel for smaller appetites, but we went for the main event. Warming trays were set out on our pushed-together tables, and the separate dishes started marching forth from the kitchen, each sufficient for two portions each. Basic were the bowls of rice, one plain, cooked white, the other fried and mixed with toasted coconut. The other 21 items constituted satays, salads, pork cubes, green beans with bean sprouts, beef stew, lamb skewers, chicken chunks in hot peanut sauce, scallion pancakes…and tofu (untouched by either of us). Beer was the beverage. Passing patrons took in the spread and offered to assist us in eating it all. We didn’t need help, but we also didn’t need dinner that night. We had an agreeable conversation with three Aussies at the next table. They were here on a short trip. (How do you make a short trip from Australia?) The final accounting was only €69.90, a notable bargain.

On our stroll down Spuistraat the day before, we noticed a fish house called Lucius (#247, www.lucius.nl). It looked good, so we returned for dinner and scored the last table without a reservation - not wise, judging from the evident popularity of the place. After two proseccos and generously proportioned appetizers of a bowl of clams and plate of buttery-textured pickled herring, we attacked a big platter of seafood, what the French call a plateau de fruits de mer. That’s one of my favorite all-time meals, and while this wasn’t the best I’d ever had, it was up there. Arranged over the bed of cracked ice were fat juicy mussels, large plump shrimp, several sizes of clams, a halved small lobster, two crab legs, some langostines, and a sprinkling of thumbnail-sized whelks. These last required a needle to extract the tiny nubbin of flesh. It all cost a reasonable €96.50, including six glasses of wine and taxes, but before tip. Resolved to right the error of the previous afternoon, we walked back down to Spui and had espresso andArmagnac at Café Luxembourg.

No, Amsterdam is not Paris. Like other, similar Continental cities - Copenhagen, Milan, Lisbon, Munich - it will always be (for me) a sidebar to the great capitals of Europe. But it has all the components of an agreeable four or five-day drop-by. The local language is all but unpronounceable, but recognizing this, well over 90% of the native Dutch speak English. Those residents (excepting many of the substantial numbers of immigrants) are ever helpful to confused strangers and are among the most open and tolerant you might encounter.

Tags: airport anxiety, Amsterdam Station Centraal, Anne Frank, houseboats, Museumplein, Oud West, red light district, Rijksmuseum, rijsttafel, transfers, Van Gogh