Amsterdam wears its logic on its sleeve. The canals form concentric arcs, a plan laid down in the 17th century and largely unchanged. The gabled houses—those narrow, tall facades with hooks at the top for hoisting furniture—line the waterways in rows that look almost fictional. The brick is a particular shade of red-brown. The windows are large, divided into small panes. Everything feels scaled for a city that had to build upward because it had no room to spread.
Bicycles outnumber people. You'll see them chained to every bridge railing, parked in teetering stacks, flowing through the streets in a separate current from cars and pedestrians. The bike infrastructure—red lanes, dedicated traffic lights—is impossible to miss. So are the canal boats, the houseboats moored along the water, and the flat-bottomed tourist vessels that glide beneath the low bridges.
Dutch has its own look: the double vowels, the ij digraph, the way words run long. Street signs are often blue. The cobblestones are varied—sometimes brick, sometimes rounded. Look for the leaning buildings—many tilt forward slightly, a feature of the original construction—and the way the light reflects off the canals, especially in the golden hour. Amsterdam has a quality of light that painters have tried to capture for centuries. When you're guessing, trust the calm order of it all. This is a city that figured out how to live with water, and it shows.
