Thunderstorms, Museums, Sun

The weather can turn quickly in Amsterdam. But, unlike Hong Kong where the sky is obscured by the skyscrapers, you can see weather rolling in.
Awake at 5am local time, the sunrise was beautiful...

But thunderstorms soon followed. I learned that Buienradar is a great resource if your view of the incoming clouds is at all limited, and it was accurate in telling us that we had a window of about an hour between 8:30 - 9:30am to walk from our Airbnb to the tramstop (and it worked!). 

First stop for the day, taking tram #7, was the Rijksmuseum - the great Dutch artists are all on display here.

There were some great guide cards for T to get involved - to spot things and describe important features of the Rembrandts and Vermeer... 

A quick sandwich at 11 and some more friendship from our grey clouds, we were washed in raincoats and umbrella past galleries and organic corner stores onto tram #5 to Central Station and along to the NEMO Science Museum. K and I were counting the number of times our one-tracked T mentioned ice-cream... turns out that's not as easy to find down the backstreets and canal promenades as one might expect.

Joining the swarm of kids on the first two floors of the NEMO seemed to help forget our failed mission to find ice cream...

After we had created drinking water, built dams, tricked our eyes and brains, etc, the rain subsided and out came the sun to invite us to meander back through central Amsterdam.

Wine, Lebanese food (fish and chips? this was a fiasco that earned us a free ice-cream!), and some outdoor dining later, we return to Rembrandt Park for some good playgrounding, before hitting the sack by 9pm. 

A day in Amsterdam - tick!