A summary of the final thirty six hours on the ship to start with.

We’d spent the day over the water from the main part of Amsterdam that most people visit when they hit the capital city of the Netherlands and very much enjoyed the street art museum, STRAAT, and the visit to Oedipus Brewery.

Celebrity Silhouette was due to depart late at night so we didn’t eat ashore, instead making it back in plenty of time to hit the main dining room for dinner, and the remainder of the evening was spent hopping around the bars and making use of our drinks package.

Towards the very end of the evening I took a few photos of some of the more vacant spaces on the ship as she began the slow cruise along the IJ towards the locks at IJmuiden.

The final day on the ship was a typical lazy sea day of quizzes, reading, and watching the world go by, snacking, and drinking, but not going crazy because the following day would be an early departure to get to the car and get home in time for work, and we didn’t want a repeat of the over-the-top experience of the last night of our first cruise on Silhouette a few years earlier.

It was nice to pass between Dover and Calais and to see both coastlines from the ship as well as just how busy the route was with ferries.

There were other cruise bloggers on this cruise and there had been talk amongst them all of meeting up to discuss god-knows-what or network or whatever. Fortunately for us, only one of those people knew what we looked like as we’d met before, knew we’d probably not want to join in, and she came to warn us about the meeting because it was due to take place at a table next to us in a bar we were sitting at. We decided to just sit and watch from a distance and were glad we did. We like to stay on the periphery of things because you can sometimes get glimpses of the real people that way when they’re not presenting the social media friendly version of themselves. The things we could tell you about some of the things other cruise bloggers have done or said when they don’t realise who you are or what you can overhear!

And finally, the final night’s dinner and proof that we were back on the Martinis.

We had not been impressed with our first cruise on Celebrity Silhouette, largely because everyone had played up just how good Celebrity were in terms of style and food and service, and it had mostly been utterly appalling in those last two categories in particular. This second cruise on Silhouette, to the same place, was definitely better for its lack of outright staff hostility but we were still left mostly underwhelmed.

We avoided speciality dining this time because we’d been unimpressed before, sticking to the main dining room. Our waiters were lovely, but the food was once more not great. Temperature problems, lack of taste. Nothing terrible, but not very good either.

The drinks range on the ship was good, and the quality of the drinks was also good, but service in some of the bars was woeful as there were not enough staff to cover the area so only the people near the bar ever seemed to get any table service. That’s poor management and poor training.

Silhouette has some nice areas, yes, but it also has some quite hideous parts. For what Celebrity tend to charge for their cruises, they’re simply not a line we’re really ever going to consider again because we’ve been let down by the food twice now and the ratio of staff to passengers in bars was awful. Short cruises aren’t always the best way to experience a line but their pricing makes longer cruises a financial risk we’re not prepared to take, and we were only on the ship again this time – like those other cruise bloggers – because it was a good deal.

But we enjoyed Amsterdam, especially visiting different parts of it this time around, and not just posting photos from the same old locations everyone else goes to time after time. The cruise was a nice break, we didn’t come away thinking dark thoughts about the cruise line, but it would take a spectacular itinerary at a fantastic price to tempt us aboard again.

Much of the walk was not particularly interesting but we started by crossing the Zijkanaal I, a side channel with some attractive little waterside houses along its length. In front of one we also saw a narrow train track running alongside it and an older gentleman outside with controls sending a small steam train along the length. We stopped and watched for a couple of minutes, sharing in the joy of a fun little hobby.

We’re fans of architecture – you’ll see that this post is tagged to show it and by following that tag you’ll see just how often we make a point of photographing or talking about the architecture we see when we travel – so it was very nice to see a few examples of the Amsterdam School movement here in Amsterdam. If it could almost be Art Deco in red brick and you’re in the Netherlands then it’s probably the Amsterdam School design you’re looking at. The building below was formerly a school, built in the early 1920s, but now, like so many historic buildings, apartments.

Our target was Oedipus and we arrived there at a fair pace because thick, black clouds were rolling in over us and raindrops had just started to fall as we entered the premises. A large space providing some food options to go with the many drink options in a colourful, cartoon-like environment was very welcome by this point, and we were instantly amused by the toilet door decorations as the male character resembled a friend of ours. We made a point of sending him a photo.

We’d not long sat down with our first drink than the rain started to really come down, and when you’re in a large space with corrugated roofing the noise is deafening. The angle of the rain started to come through the main entrance too so the shutters had to be pulled down for about ten minutes giving all of us in there a bit of a lockdown feel.

One other fun element while we were in the Oedipus brewery in Amsterdam was a group of British blokes on a stag weekend. They were well-behaved but at one point one of them went to the bar to ask about jenever, as they sold it there in addition to beers. We’ve had jenever before and once was definitely enough. What this guy wanted, though, was to effectively try a Jägerbomb but with a local beer and jenever. The barman suggested this was a bad idea but the rest of the stag do suggested it was a great idea and everyone watched to see the result. It was, indeed, based on the facial expression, a bad idea, but amusing.

After a few drinks and definite improvement in the weather we headed back to the ship. The walk to the nearest free ferry crossing was one punctuated by artwork. Some apartment blocks had art canvases on their ends but the piece I most liked was one called The Wall by Alfred Eikelenboom. The original piece had been erected in 1987, been constructed from red steel, been controversial, been described as an eyesore not fitting the location and spoiling the view, and had fallen into disrepair. However, it had become a local fixture so money was spent on creating a new version in 2020, this time in plastic, and the version you now see today.

We didn’t have to wait long for a ferry across the water, which was handy as it had started to rain again, and we would soon be back aboard Celebrity Silhouette.

In the final post in this short cruise travelogue series I’ll include a few more photos from aboard the ship on the last couple of nights with some further thoughts about cruising with Celebrity.

This post will lack many words – you can stop cheering now – because whilst we walked around to admire the artwork and read about the pieces, I didn’t actually take any photos of the information panels about the street art so don’t really know who the artists were in each case or what the pieces were called. I could probably find out a few if I tried, but if you cared enough to know then you could probably find that out yourself.

STRAAT opened in 2020 in a former welding warehouse that had transitioned to an indoor market with decorative pieces before exclusively serving as a museum to the artwork. It was huge, and it was fabulous. You could spend a long time there, and we did.

There were some less conventional pieces of street art, including some 3D works.

After completing our winding walk around all the pieces at ground level I made my way up a set of steps to a viewing platform set high in the warehouse. From here you could really get a feel for the space and how it had been filled with the colourful art.

As we left it was nice to see that the exterior walls of STRAAT were designated as canvasses for locals and more amateur street artists to produce their art. The quality couldn’t match what was inside, of course, but everyone’s got to start somewhere.

STRAAT was wonderful and it gets our coveted nod of approval which is our way of saying you should visit without actually going so far as to recommend things. You don’t know us. We don’t know you. It’s also just a short and free ferry ride away from Centraal station in Amsterdam and makes for a nice, modern activity that contrasts well with all the historical elements you might find in the more tourist-heavy areas of the Dutch capital.

In the next post in this Celebrity Silhouette cruise travelogue series we’ll stay on the Amsterdam-Noord side of the IJ and head towards a brewery while we keep one eye on the rain clouds.

I am a fan of Amsterdam’s architecture which is largely eclectic and modern, and if there’s anything remotely brutalist in appearance then I’ll probably take a photo of it.

We could see the A’DAM Tower on the north side of Amsterdam and we know a fair number of cruise bloggers had visited there on trips to this Netherlands destination in the past because of its high viewpoint and the swings that offer a thrill from the roof. We might do the same at some future point, but that wasn’t our plan for this visit.

As Celebrity Silhouette completed docking beside the cruise port we headed up to take part in the morning trivia, figuring it would be lightly-attended and we’d have a reasonable chance of winning. It was lightly-attended but we did not win.

We’d taken everything we’d need for the day before we’d taken part in the trivia so as to give our steward all the time he needed to clean our room, so as soon as the quizzing was over we headed down to the gangway and made our way ashore.

Our initial walking destination was to the waterside part of Amsterdam’s Centraal station and this would take us past some of that eclectic architecture I’ve already mentioned. First to catch my eyes were the ventilation shafts over one of the tunnels under the canal. Not as visually appealing as those along the North Sea Canal that we’d seen a few times before (and would again when we departed), but very distinctive.

The building below has escaped my quick check to find out much about its history but it was at the time of photographing it a Levi Strauss corporate office in Amsterdam. It feels like it might have once belonged to a shipping company given the position by the water but it would be nice to know the reason behind the mock castle appearance.

The final interesting bit of architecture on our short walk was that of of NACO Huisje, or the Koppe’s Shipping Agency Office, originally built in 1919. The odd, outward-sloping face to the roof design and its mounting on concrete supports is definitely eye-catching. The present location of the building comes following removal of it in 2003 from a few hundred metres away during heavy redevelopment of the area. The building’s status as a national monument meant it couldn’t be demolished but it took until 2021 before a new spot was found and it was finally returned to Amsterdam’s waterfront.

We completed our walk to the ferry terminals outside Centraal. The one we were after was the one to the NDSM area on Amsterdam-Noord, and the wonderful thing about Amsterdam’s ferries is that they run regularly, making them very convenient, and they’re also free for pedestrians, adding to their appeal and usefulness.

A short ride took us across the water with views back along it to where our cruise ship was docked.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll have a look around the museum dedicated to street art from around the world, STRAAT, and it is an absolutely fabulous place indeed.

When we’d arrived in Amsterdam the day before, the Holland America Line cruise ship Nieuw Statendam had already been docked and we’d needed to slip past her and come alongside at the port, butt-to-butt (or aft-to-aft in nautical speak). The HAL ship had already left prior to our departure but its position had been replaced by the Viking Jupiter. Those ships had both been facing roughly west which meant they could simply cruise away from Amsterdam without any issue but our ship was facing roughly east with the bulk of the city on our starboard side and Java-eiland to the port. I’ve no doubt that the captain of Silhouette and/or the pilot could have negotiated the entire length of the canal and passage through the locks backwards but you usually have to pay extra for a Showing Off cruise and they don’t tend to include those sorts of manoeuvres on 3-nighters. Getting out, therefore, involved moving away from the dock, reversing back past Viking Jupiter until Java-eiland was cleared, then moving forward, putting Java-eiland now on our starboard side until the width of the waterway was sufficient for Celebrity Silhouette to perform a 180 degree turn.

Viking Jupiter

We happen to live just ten minutes walking distance from Portsmouth Port. What we’re really hoping is that more cruise lines start to use Portsmouth as a turnaround port rather than just a cruise stop to increase our opportunities to experience new cruise lines from a fabulous location for us. Sure, there’s the challenge of trailing cases through the edges of Buckland while waving a nail-studded club around threateningly to ward off the local youth but the convenience of being able to leave the car outside the home (or somebody else’s home in whichever street we managed to find a parking space in the night before travelling) would be worth it.

Why am I talking about Portsmouth Port? Well, very shortly before we took this taster cruise there was a new visitor to our local port, that being Viking Jupiter. Our local port can only take ships of a certain size and while there are plans for some expansion this will still leave it on the short side for our preferences. We’re Goldilocks cruisers, looking for something not too big and not too small, a not too young and not too old demographic, not too basic and not too pampered. Viking Jupiter is probably a little on the small side for us and perhaps a little too luxurious for us (read: expensive; we’re not tight-arses but we do like to get value for money) but it was nice to see her gleaming in the port and it was a pleasant surprise to then discover she’d followed us to the Dutch capital during our departure. She’s a new ship in the Viking fleet and a very attractive one too.

Leaving Amsterdam

Passing Viking Jupiter left us with views of the main part of Amsterdam with its canals and church towers prominent and also a large number of riverboats. Some people call them ships, some call them boats, some call them barges with ideas above their stations; whatever you call them, there were a lot of them and we saw examples from Viking river cruises, Amadeus, and Scenic, among others. We still can’t get excited about river cruising despite the obvious push from various lines in the early part of this year to promote them with TV advertising and appearances plus freebie trips handed out to influencers. The sea is in our blood; rivers are in the countryside. We want waves. We want uninterrupted views to the horizon under cloudless skies at night. I’m sure river cruising is just lovely but it would have to be a spectacular price in a spectacular location to tempt us and right now the former looks exceedingly unlikely and the latter is limited to Russia, India, and China.

On the opposite side of the ship (starboard if you’re keeping track) we passed the A’DAM Tower and the Eye Film Museum, both wonderful buildings from an architectural perspective and both places we’ve not yet visited on our two trips to Amsterdam. Should we return – the Dutch government seem to be going out of their way to reduce tourism to the city so that’s not a given – then there’s a good chance we’ll take advantage of the ferry that transfers passengers across the water to check both locations out.

Maritime Quarter

By the time I’d taken a few more photos around the ship and returned to our room to rejoin my wife, the ship was coming up on the Maritime Quarter of Amsterdam. My wife had shown no signs of having missed my company nor any remorse at failing to express joy upon my return when I mentioned it and so I felt justified in stepping straight out onto the balcony to grab some more photos of the ship’s passage along the North Sea Canal.

Not quite the first thing that caught my eye in this part of the city’s outskirts was a graffiti-daubed submarine in the water. My first thought was that this was most likely a floating museum but some research after the cruise has determined that this vessel is one of the last of the Soviet navy’s Zulu-class attack submarines, designated 4711 B-80, moved into its current position by owners who wanted to transform it into a party boat, said plan abandoned when it was realised that the risk of drunk people getting launched from torpedo tubes was something insurers were unwilling to cover.

The actual first thing that caught my eye in the Maritime Quarter was Botel, a floating hotel with views to the submarine just across the water from it. Its bright white exterior and fantastically funky font advertising its name and hinting at its functionality are pretty hard to miss. For people who like being on the water this could be an interesting option as a location to stay if visiting Amsterdam for a few days and the area has a regular ferry service running to the main part of the city.

Beyond the Botel was the marina. I love being on or by the water but yachting leaves me cold.

A lot of this area was formerly shipyards and some of that work still goes on to this day. Alongside the marina were a number of dry docks, some of them with vessels in being worked on.

The most interesting ship for me was the MS Deutschland, quite obviously a small cruise ship but one with a fascinating dual role these days and a history that is probably only generally known to German people (understandably, given its name). For part of the year the ship is named World Odyssey and is used for educational purposes taking students abroad to study, and sponsored academically by Colorado State University. For the remainder of the year the ship is chartered by the German company Phoenix Reisen, given the name MS Deutschland, and undertakes more traditional cruising. Until 2015, the ship was the primary filming location for a long-running German series, Das Traumschiff, and if you want to catch glimpses of MS Deutschland visiting exotic locations around the world, blatant product placement, and some horrible disregarding of international cruising regulations then the internet is your friend.

The appearance of the small piece of green land, Keerkringpark, marked the point at which I decided most of the interesting landmarks along the northern side of the North Sea Canal were at an end, plus there was trivia about to start so I took a break from documenting our departure from Amsterdam and returned to the room to gee my wife into action. We did horribly in the trivia but we still had that victory the day before to cling onto.

IJmuiden

I’ve written about IJmuiden before (on the approach to the Netherlands and departing from the Netherlands on P&O’s Azura in 2017). Now, when IJmuiden thinks of IJmuiden and wants other people to think of IJmuiden it probably thinks of IJmuiden in the sense of a port city with a beach and plenty of history and lots of places for tourists to come and spend their money. But when I think of IJmuiden I picture the complex to its north. I picture the beautiful, belching, brutal buildings of that industrial complex and it makes me feel warm inside. Is this because I grew up on a diet of science fiction TV and VHS movies in the 1980s predominately set in places like this and it happens to trigger pangs of nostalgia? I’d like to think so, but I’ll also take “It’s because you’re fricking weird, Mark” as I consider that a compliment every time it’s uttered.

Here’s some video (temporarily removed) of Celebrity Silhouette passing through the locks at IJmuiden in case you’re one of the nine people currently alive on the planet who’s ever wondered just what that’s like.

Something I’d not spotted before when we’d passed through the locks at IJmuiden was SHIP, a place to experience the construction of the new sea lock, the port area, port professions, and even hit the restaurant to watch vessels passing by. Something to bear in mind as a point of interest if you’re ever cruising to Amsterdam on a line that has decided not to pay the Dutch capital’s increased charges so that it can pass on the inconvenience to its customers and dock 45 minutes away instead. No names mentioned. Not even a pair of letters separated by an ampersand mentioned.

That concluded our time in the Netherlands aboard Celebrity Silhouette. There will be one more post covering our time on this ship which will go through the evening’s entertainment and dining and terrifying amounts of drinking. Was there dancing? Yes, there was dancing too, but you’re in luck because the only bits caught on camera were done by other people.

Maybe not. We may not be music festival people but we are experiential people, especially when it’s not a common experience, and for the obvious reason that life is short, nobody really knows what tomorrow will bring, but that the good money is on our species dying off in a failed science attempt to undo the damage to the planet before we reach retirement age. Many people have walked on the Great Wall of China (done it) and many people have seen the Northern Lights (that too) but the number who have experienced both is small as a fraction of the planet’s population. We’ve experienced a lot of things that combine to make our travels unique and this opportunity to attend a music festival in a foreign country is just another one to add to the list. It’s that one-upmanship that everyone who travels shares; we all want to be the ones in conversations to have done the thing or combination of things that nobody else has done, to ignite even a mote of jealousy. Don’t believe any traveller who denies it.

Westerpark

And so to the second part of our day in Amsterdam, the part following on from our successful search for Sex And Violence And Beer. Leaving the bar we headed towards Westerpark, a place you may not be at all surprised to learn is a park to the, er, west of the city, even if you don’t speak any Dutch.

We could hear the music from the very outskirts of the park so the lack of any signs wasn’t a problem at all. A few paths headed in the general direction through the grassy areas and trees and it was an easy enough walk so long as you kept an eye out for cyclists thundering through (well, it is Amsterdam) and obviously drunk or stoned guys swaying and shouting incoherently (well, it is Amsterdam) and veered away from them. We diverted slightly from the most direct route towards the music in order to take a look at a lake in which there was a statue of a headless woman (nope, no idea) and a number of birds present.

Troost Brewery

We’d expected perhaps a little more from what we saw in Westerpark and the music festival area when we entered. There was one stage where music was being performed in front of a small crowd, there was a huge open space of grass, there were some food vans in the distance, there were some buildings to one side, and there was a smaller crowd still in front of that.

On the one hand this was very early evening and the festival was due to continue until late so it might have been too early for most attendees, but on the other hand this was a Sunday so it didn’t seem like there was much else to do. The only thing that we remarked on that might have been having an effect was the wind which had been bad enough when walking in the streets of Amsterdam but out in the exposed park it was decidedly frigid indeed. We ignored the music to start with and walked straight through to the buildings because there was one thing present there that I knew from looking at the map: a brewery.

Brouwerij Troost Westergas, in its own words, “is a brewery, brewpub and shop in one” and a very attractive place indeed. A good range of ales all produced on the site, plenty of seating, food available. Well worth a visit if you’re nearby but worth noting that they only take card payments. We both went for the Brunette ale and it was bloody lovely although we had to sit outside due to the venue’s popularity, some of which may have been due to other people trying to find a way out of the wind.

DJ Stage

The smaller crowd we’d seen upon first entering Westerpark weren’t all just huddled around the brewery; the majority were instead enjoying the sounds booming out of a small stage setup hosting some DJs. Did we know any of the tunes playing? Don’t be so stupid. Did we like it? Actually, yes, because a lot of what we listened to sampled some old school hip-hop and disco and soul tracks which was right up our musical alleys. We didn’t enjoy it quite as much as some people there and when the wind whipped around in a different direction you could get the odd whiff of just why they were having such a good time but, well, it is Amsterdam.

As you can see from the photos and from the video (temporarily removed) there were plenty of coats done up tightly, many instances of gloves being worn, hats and scarfs in abundance. You can’t tell but we were huddled close together and bouncing along with the beat of the music but mostly just to keep warm as we’re not really the dancing types when we’re sober.

I was reluctant to leave the music and the opportunity to take photos of people, something I just don’t do anywhere enough these days, so I persuaded my wife to shift around and closer to the crowd enjoying the DJ to see if we could use them as a form of shelter. It didn’t really work because the wind has scary magical powers that lets it go around individuals who aren’t tightly clumped together so we didn’t stay much longer.

Music Festival Food

We decided to make our way back to the main stage but indirectly, via the food vans we’d seen a little earlier just to see if any of them were producing the right sort of smells that might entice us to part with some Euros. Short answer: no. Longer answer because when have I ever used a short answer on this site when there are sentences and paragraphs just waiting to spill forth from my fingers?: we thought the range of food on offer was pretty decent, covering most tastes and dietary requirements or choices: omnivores and vegans were equally catered for. Given the number of people actually attending the Liberation Day music festival it was probably just the right amount of food offerings too. Simply put, though, we didn’t suddenly turn to one another and say “Ooh, yes! Let’s sit on one of these chairs exposed to the elements while tucking into this fine fare!” and so we walked on by.

Main Stage Music

We reached the main stage area and located a spot at the back of the few-hundred-strong crowd gathered in front of it. We did debate moving in amongst the bodies for more shelter but the choices were either to stand amongst the smokers or the dancers.

Something we’ve found a lot when we’ve travelled in Europe is that smoking seems far more noticeable than back home. I don’t know if Europeans smoke more or if locations abroad that attract tourists just also attract a larger number of smokers through the power of statistical probability, making it more obvious than at home because who in their right mind would visit the crappy sections (that’s most of them) of Portsmouth I find myself in? It’s something we’ve observed less outside Europe, though, but not observed enough to perform any kind of scientific analysis of numbers, nor would we really want to. Maybe we’re all just more stressed here. Perhaps if more of those people travelled abroad they’d have less need to smoke. And they’d want to save their money for travelling. Travel is arguably good for a well-rounded mental state – Mark Twain, of course, famously stated: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime” – but should it be a physical health right too? And should I stop digressing and get back to describing this Liberation Day music festival in Amsterdam?

The smokers wasn’t an option, therefore, and as I’ve already indicated it takes a threshold of alcohol to get us shimmying and shaking so we thought better of mingling with the movers in case our static presences irritated those enjoying themselves. I can care about other people. There’s no need to look so surprised. We slowly edged around the back of the crowd with the intention of cutting our visit to the festival short on account of there being less to see than we’d hoped for and us being too sober to not care about being unable to feel our fingers.

The artists on stage in Westerpark were called Arp Frique And Family. It won’t surprise you to learn that we had not heard of them before but that’s pretty much true for any artist who didn’t have some form of musical success in the twentieth century. But, we quite liked the music. Good mix of African rhythms fused with elements of prog rock to form a genre you can’t find listed as a suggestion on Spotify. And the crowd certainly appreciated what they were listening to with some quite energetic dancing from some members of it near the front of the stage.

The wind was that sort of cold that you think isn’t too bad for a few seconds or a minute but it has the effect of slowly sucking out all your warmth like a sponge so our plan to head “inside, somewhere, anywhere” was still on track, but coming alongside the front of the main stage I realised there was quite a large gap between the dancers and the artists performing. Were the people leaving a respectful distance as part of some unwritten rule of music festivals in the Netherlands? Were they simply not that keen to be looking up so much at Arp Frique or his family because neck health is an important consideration on the continent? Had the bass from the speakers slowly bounced them all away from the stage without their noticing? Whatever the reason, I spied an opportunity to get a lot closer than I’d expected so mouthed to my wife (on account of us being beside the speakers) “I’m just going to get some photos near the stage.” I got a nod that said “Okay” and a tight-lipped smile that said “Be quick. If I freeze to death over here I will come back to life and kill you.”

I was quite surprised to see one of the many clones of Anthony Michael Hall taken during his filming on The Breakfast Club enjoying the music; I had him down as more of a soft rock person.

The sunset was attractive in the western sky beyond Westerpark’s Liberation Day music festival but that signalled a reduction in radiation from our solar system’s star which meant it was getting colder still. Years of marriage have honed my skills and I know the threshold beyond which I cross from irritating my wife to pissing my wife off and this was it so we made our move away from the sounds of Arp Frique and back towards the city.

J.D. William’s Whisky Bar

We could have headed straight to the ship but it felt like a waste of a visit to Amsterdam if we weren’t going to take full advantage of our time in the city. We fancied a drink – don’t feign shock – and had spotted a place that sounded interesting on our earlier walk towards Westerpark so retraced some of that route.

The place we’d spotted was called the J.D. William’s Whisky Bar and in there we dropped. We had a very friendly welcome from the single member of staff we could see working who was helping another group of people to decide what they wanted and indicated he’d be along to help us too, soon. We didn’t need any help but we did need some time to peruse the wall of whiskey (I spell it with an ‘e’) and blackboard listing what was available by type.

We know what we like: Islays. Something with a rich, peaty smell. For me, it’s a memory of trips to Ireland to see family when I was a child and toasting bread over an open peat fire. For my wife, it’s a trip to Scottish islands as a child and similar house-heating methods. The friendly barman could tell we knew our stuff but was happy to chat about options and make recommendations and made small talk as he cleared tables and refreshed drinks in the venue. Whiskey turned up along with water as well as the bottles themselves for those photos for posterity and promotion; a good move from the bar.

The drinks and ambience were fabulous and we stayed for a couple. Let’s be clear, though: come with deep wallets if you’re planning on spending any time here because, like everywhere in the Dutch capital, cheap it ain’t. Still, where else could you find such a wide range of wonderful whiskies? If you do like whiskey and want to try something a little different then this place gets our seal of approval which, while worthless, does give you an excuse and someone to blame if you’re disappointed.

It was dark when we left and we decided that would be the end of our day in Amsterdam. We made our way back to the ship at the cruise terminal where we weren’t at all surprised to see a giant clog but were somewhat perplexed by the Union Jack-decorated cow. Is there a Dutch legend about a British cow swimming to the Netherlands? Let’s just assume so.

That concludes our day in Amsterdam; a day of museums, drinking, music, and occasional periods of not having any sensation in our fingers. In the remaining travel portfolio posts the final day of this short cruise aboard Celebrity Silhouette will be covered, including departure from the Dutch capital, travel along the North Sea Canal and through the locks at IJmuiden, and speciality dining in the Murano restaurant followed by the evening’s entertainment on the ship.

We didn’t have any excursions booked in Amsterdam as we’d been to the Netherlands on Azura a few years earlier and made great use of a city card to take in a lot of sights and experiences already. But we’re not generally fans of just playing things by ear, especially after a cruise at the end of last year where we did that a little too much and came away feeling we’d spent far too much of our time wandering when we could have been learning, so we did have a rough plan for the day’s activities.

Our day and night in the Dutch capital city was taking place on Liberation Day which meant there was a music festival taking place on the outskirts. We don’t do music festivals at home because they tend to go hand-in-hand with tents and we really don’t do tents. But a free festival in a foreign country is something for the experience checklist so that would be where we would end up and that will be covered in the next post. Ahead of that, though, we had an afternoon and early evening to hit Amsterdam and find some things to interest us. We’d done the canals, numerous museums, and even the zoo on our previous visit but there were always more museums to take a nose at and we had our eyes set on two in particular: something sexy and something violent.

Dam Square

Finding your way around Amsterdam is very easy as the city is effectively a series of concentric semi-circular canals centred on the train station with roads that more-or-less run horizontally and vertically through them. I tend to navigate through landmarks after taking a look at a map and planning an approximate route coupled with my pretty decent natural sense of direction. The less said about how my wife navigates, the better. Neither of us really use phones that much; it’s often only brought out to confirm that we’ve not missed what we were roughly aiming for or to confirm that we have and it was ages ago. Our first target was Dam Square, a large, open space at the southern end of the older, central section of Amsterdam and also a mutterance I’m trying to make popular with the kids. “I was hoping my eyebrows was going to be all on fleek but nah, it’s Dam Square.”

Coming out of the cruise terminal we headed right which took us towards the Centraal train station, then followed the main road as it swung left over tram tracks and under a bridge for the trains, then straight over a wide canal before angling right again onto Prins Hendrikkade.

This brought us outside the Basilica of Saint Nicholas and facing the facade of the Centraal train station across the canal.

We then followed Damrak to the south knowing that it would bring us to the square in short order.

The square is a wide open space intersected by many tram lines and with the clear landmarks of Madame Tussaud’s to the south, the National Monument to the west, and the Royal Palace to the east.

The National Monument is a concrete pillar, 22 metres in height, covered in white stone. It was erected as a permanent replacement for a “liberty pole” that had been raised in the same location to celebrate the end of World War II. With this being the weekend of the celebration of the Netherlands’ Liberty Day it was bedecked with wreaths and attracted a large crowd of attendees paying their respects.

One place we really need to put on our list of places to visit for the next time we hit Amsterdam is the Royal Palace. Originally built in the mid-17th century as the town hall it became the palace early in the 19th century at around the end of Napoleon’s reign over that part of Europe and the restoration of the monarchy to the country.

The square was pretty crowded and the largest group we were attracted to seemed to be formed around a small number of people with microphones. Our first guess was that this was something specific to Liberty Day again as we’d heard that there were often talks commemorating the war dead on this day but we soon realised this was another one of those “Watch us do some tricksy dances and jumps then grab some people from around for some audience participation then ask for money” things. We didn’t stay long as it started to rain quite persistently at this point.

“Raining,” I said to my wife, pulling my hoodie up and trying to protect my camera from the worst of the inclement weather. “Dam Square.”

“Nobody is going to start using that phrase,” she replied as we left the location. “Just stop it.”

We headed south along Rokin past an interesting-looking sculpture and didn’t stop until we reached the first of the museums that we were interested in and the one that would satisfy our search for violence in Amsterdam.

The Torture Museum

Amsterdam’s Torture Museum isn’t the first museum dedicated to the history of torture through the ages that we’ve visited. In fact, it’s precisely because we’d found our trip to the Torture Museum in Bruges so interesting that we wanted to compare it with the Dutch take on the same topic. Plus, as anyone who knows me will attest, I’m a dedicated misanthrope and atheist and anything that reinforces my conclusions about the barbarity of humans in general and organised religions in particular is fine by me.

Trying to be very fair here with the torture museum comparisons there are certain things that each country’s exploration of one of the darker chapters of mankind’s search for truth does better than the other. The Belgian museum certainly had the more detailed information so if you really want to learn why torture was used and how it both spread and faded from use then Bruges is where you want to go. On the other hand if you like your experience of torture equipment to be in a narrow, squeaky-floored building with red and blue lighting that plays absolute havoc with your attempts to take any pictures then it’s hard to fault Amsterdam. In each of the museums, though, you’ll look at some of the equipment and the descriptions next to them and you’ll wince and clench your buttocks tightly as you shuffle past so they both do equally well there.

American Beer

We’d chosen to visit the Torture Museum first as it was the farthest point from the cruise ship we’d wanted to reach. Heading back towards the centre of Amsterdam for the second of our museums of the day we stopped en route at the Beer Temple because torture makes you thirsty.

Generally, we favour local ales when we’re travelling but we’d been to Amsterdam before and satisfied that desire so we were more open to alternative drinking establishments. This place, specialising in American craft beer and with 35 on draught plus a couple of hundred others available in cans and bottles, was on the way and an easy side-journey to take.

We parked ourselves at the bar and had a very nice couple of drinks each. The staff were friendly and there was some great music being played. When Joe Walsh’s In The City started up and I nodded appreciatively at the barman, remarking it was the end music to The Warriors, this led to the pair of us re-enacting that scene from the film. As you know, that’s a global law when anyone mentions that movie and I’m no lawbreaker.

The Erotic Museum

The Erotic Museum on Oudezijds Achterburgwal, close to the heart of the city’s red light district, was where we headed next. This naturally took us past Oude Kerk, the presence of which in that part of the city still amuses us.

Set in a typically Dutch, narrow, multistorey building, the ground floor was a shop for any of your erotic needs while a staircase – once you’d paid the entrance fee, of course – led upstairs to the floors housing all sorts of erotic memorabilia in roughly-themed collections. I was quite surprised and very pleased to be told that photography was allowed, something I’d not been expecting. The collections covered such broad areas as erotic sculptures or fertility symbols, pornographic photography, erotic artwork, dolls, movies, bondage, etc. It was a little light on information – you won’t find the reason that people have decided to make salt and pepper shakers in the form of penises, for instance – but there was a large amount to look at – such as salt and pepper shakers in the form of penises, if that’s the sort of thing that interests you – and it was all organised well. The presence of sketches by John Lennon was a welcome addition to what some might see as otherwise frivolous and titillating.

If you’ve reached this part of this post and have been at all shocked at any of the pictures here, blushing brightly and maybe even mouthing “Dam Square” under your breath as you scroll quickly past, then may I humbly recommend you read the title of things you’re looking at on the internet in the future?

Dutch Ales

We’d originally had no firm plans beyond this point of our general idea for how to occupy ourselves during our day in Amsterdam other than head west towards the park where the Liberation Day music festival was taking place and see if there was somewhere to stop for a drink on the way. However, our stop at the Beer Temple had alerted us to another location run by the same group of people called Proeflokaal Arendsnest. Instead of American imports this bar only served Dutch ales, fifty on draught and over a hundred bottled. And it was roughly in the right direction for us too. We headed there, passing the usual array of attractive examples of architecture and very photographable canals in the city.

The bar itself was also attractive but somewhat lacking in seating space for the large number of people present. Obviously, a good sign as to the quality of the ales on offer. There was a nice view out to one of Amsterdam’s canals and some outside seating was available but only those with a nicotine fix to address or who laughed in the face of bitter northerly winds braved them.

In the next post of this series covering our short cruise aboard Celebrity Silhouette to Amsterdam I’ll cover our experience of the Liberation Day music festival and, yes, there may just be a little more drinking involved.

This was our first time in Silhouette’s buffet area, The Oceanview Café, as we’re not the sort of people who head directly for that sort of venue on a cruise ship when we board and we’d had no need of its services until this point. We know that some people see that the food in buffets is included in the price of the cruise, worry that everyone else will eat it all before they do, and make it their goal to stake out spots in the restaurant for much of the duration of the cruise. We were on a cruise once when we spotted the same woman sitting at the same table every time we popped into the buffet so we started coming up with excuses to pass through the location at odd times of the day to see if she was still there and came to the conclusion she’d eaten herself into a coma at some point early on and the staff had been too polite to move her on.

Anyway, the Oceanview Café was very nice. Large, open, great variety of food in sensibly-arranged food stations, excellent coffee facilities, including real cream to add to it. And proper crockery, Princess, hint, hint. And hash browns. My wife loves them. They had them. Every day, Princess, hint, hint. She was happy about that and I was happy that she was happy. Food quality, though… ah. I skipped a few items I’d originally angled towards when I saw the state of them. Fried eggs, for instance. I know that Americans have that thing where they ask for fried eggs “Sunny side up” or “Over easy” and so on whereas I tend to just like them “Cooked” but I’m not sure why the default preparation for fried eggs on Celebrity Silhouette appeared to be “Compact and grey, like those aliens that probed me”. With no seats anywhere to be seen indoors we headed outside into the sharp wind and faint smell of cigarettes from somewhere to wolf down the breakfast then grabbed coffees and made our way across to the Sky Lounge.

Morning Trivia

There was method in our madness of braving the open deck even more to make our way from the buffet to the observation lounge at the front of the ship. We’d taken a look at the things taking place on the ship during the morning’s approach to Amsterdam and ruled out the port seminar (we’d been to the Dutch capital before and didn’t think we’d learn a whole lot of relevant information) and the various art events taking place (hosted by Park West Gallery and, well, we’ve had a falling out with them which involved so much drama it belongs in an episode of a soap opera and not on this site, but I’ll probably write up about it one day) and the dancing (just, no). But there was trivia taking place and we like a good quiz.

The Sky Lounge was fairly quiet when we got there but people drifted in slowly as the time for the quiz approached, with some seemingly quite fascinated by the skyline we were slowly cruising towards; IJmuiden makes for a wonderfully dystopic sight and if there’s one thing better than cruising to beautiful destinations it’s cruising to places that make you reminisce about all those cheesy VHS tapes your dad used to rent in the 1980s about biker gangs patrolling the landscape of a world where everything except motorcycle repair shops has been destroyed.

A bit of inspired guessing and a smidge of dragging some answer out of some dusty memory hole and just a soupçon of all the really smart people probably nursing hangovers and not turning up saw us achieve a comfortable victory for which we received trivia prizes from across the other side of the world. Exotic!

We passed through the indoor pool area, snapped a couple of photos, and headed off back to our room to watch the rest of the approach to Amsterdam.

Approaching Amsterdam

We were on the starboard side of Celebrity Silhouette, the same side of the ship we’d been on when we’d previously cruised to Amsterdam aboard P&O’s Azura in 2017, our preferred side of ships for reasons of tradition and helping someone’s wife not get lost, and, subsequently, we got to see many of the same things on the approach to Amsterdam as we’d seen then. Not that this stopped me taking photos, of course, but I may have taken fewer than usual.

I’m fond of architecture when we travel and I’ve got an appreciation that spans all of history with ancient styles and absolutely modern designs both finding equal favour. One of the most prominent buildings along the southern side of the North Sea Canal on the outskirts of Amsterdam was the Pontsteiger building. The area around this impressive-looking structure was formerly a port where cargo ships would unload timber but is now undergoing renovation. The suspended bridge section of the Pontsteiger reminded us of a building we’d seen in Beijing on our very first cruise but it also reminded me of the shapes I used to make with Rubik’s Snake and I’d like to think that the architect did the same thing and was duly inspired.

The Pontsteiger pretty much marked where the industrial outskirts of Amsterdam were giving way to the commercial and residential areas of the capital. We knew we were very close when we started spotting some of the outermost of the city’s famous canals which, if you look at a map, spread out like ripples as if the central train station had been dropped from a great height onto the edge of the IJ and water had rushed in to fill the trenches. The Dutch are crazy. I would not rule that out as their construction technique.

If you’re on a cruise coming into Amsterdam then the Centraal train station is the final big landmark before you reach the cruise terminal and docking area for ships. Riverboats, though, have a far larger set of jetties and surface area in which they can tie up and allow their passengers ashore on a desperate hunt for beer cheese and this is handy as an awful lot of riverboats visit Amsterdam. Or they did this day. It’s interesting looking at the boats tied up alongside one another forcing passengers to go through (or over; who knows?) a vessel owned and operated by another company entirely. This has got to present some potentially worrying situations late at night if you’re returning to your boat in slightly inebriated fashion (the best way) but your boat is behind another one so you’ve got to remember not just what boat you sailed into this strange city on but also what the boat nearest the dock looked like or was called. “Is this one ours? No, I don’t think ours had a statue of a bear throwing a trident at a dolphin in the central area so let’s carry on. I don’t think this one is ours either as I’m sure our riverboat was built after the fall of the Soviet Union. Has to be the next one. No, this is definitely not ours but it looks a lot nicer than our one. I wonder if we can transfer. Well, this is a problem because there’s only open river beyond this.”

The river cruising bug hasn’t bitten us yet. The river cruising bug hasn’t even shown an interest in landing on an exposed bit of flesh. Perhaps because we’ve grown up beside the sea in a historical, naval port we naturally secrete a pheromone that wards off river cruising bugs.

Holland America Lines Nieuw Statendam

We had one last sight to see as Celebrity Silhouette finally approached the cruise terminal in Amsterdam: already alongside in the city was the newest Holland America Line cruise ship, Nieuw Statendam. We’ve always liked the look of the HAL ships and have read favourable reviews and comparisons with our preferred cruise line, Princess, in terms of itineraries and service but we’ve always worried that we wouldn’t be able to pronounce their ship names and we’d be looked down upon by the staff on board.

It was great to slowly pass so close to the other ship, to marvel at the precision piloting of the vessel, to be mesmerised by the reflection of the Celebrity Silhouette in the glass balconies and cabin doors of Nieuw Statendam, and to fervently hope to catch someone doing something they shouldn’t be doing in one of the rooms we were gliding by. Recording a video walkthrough of their cabin in portrait mode, for instance.

A lovely bit of parking (I think that’s the correct term) then took place as we passed the aft of the HAL vessel and manoeuvred into position at Amsterdam’s cruise dock. The gap between the two ships looked very small indeed from our vantage point on our balcony but I know that the brain’s ability to judge sizes at distance and from unusual perspectives is quite poor and while we drew in deep breaths and made oohing noises (not caught on video) there was no real danger of the two ships colliding with easily ten, maybe even twelve, centimetres separating us.

We got our bags ready and read for a bit while we waited for immigration to clear the vessel to disembark. We hadn’t arranged an excursion in Amsterdam because we were confident enough in our own ability to find things of interest and we had a skeleton of a plan for the day all worked out anyway. That will be covered in the next post in this series covering our taster cruise with Celebrity Cruises on Celebrity Silhouette.