This is one of my favorite things to visit in Amsterdam....much better than the Anne Frank House, etc. The only place I liked more than the Van Gogh Museum is the Rijksmuseum. I don’t remember it costing anything like that much to get in though the last time I was there in 2003.
I went to A-dam for St. Patrick’s Day weekend in ‘96 and walked past all the museums on my way to and from the Heineken plant. Back then, Heineken in Holland was sold in brown bottles but the beer itself was the best I’ve ever had. After walking past the Amsterdam Hilton, we walked into a cafe’ that had a special on red hash. On one of the walls was a TV tuned to reports of a nasty riot (Kurdish-Turkish) in Dusseldorf. We had been on our way to A-dam earlier that day on the Bahn when a German riot squad shut down traffic to let a series of green buses, K9 vans, transport vehicles and motorcycles through to the scene but we didn’t know at where they were going. After leaving that cafe’, we walked right past the Rembrandt Museum on our way to the Red Light district but it must’ve been the wrong one because most of the women we saw in those windows were older and way out of shape, so we walked past that and found another cafe’ that had Heineken on draft. The beautiful barmaid poured us a perfect pitcher and asked if we’d been to the museums and I said “maybe later” and “Happy St. Patrick’s Day”.
On my trade show trip to Amsterdam, I went to the Rijksmuseum, but the lines to get into the Van Gogh Museum were too long.
Wish we had more than a day for sightseeing.