Like all great world capitals, Amsterdam is a great walking city, and its semi-circular, arching grid lay-out, crisscrossed with canals and bridges--400 of them, begun in the 17th century--makes it a very easy city to navigate. A few hours' stroll will pretty much give you the entire scope of the historic part of the city south of the train station.  Choose your form of transport, bicycle or boat, and you can take in the landscape with ease.  (They do have cars in Amsterdam but traffic is not one of the big problems of this modern metropolis.) Near perfect English is spoken by literally everyone, about 780,000 natives.
     But you'll need days more to visit the principal artistic and cultural sites. To make a dent in Amsterdam's myriad restaurants (which I will be writing about in an upcoming column), would take far longer, from the Indonesian rijstaffel eateries to the pubs and fine dining restaurants throughout.
    On a recent visit, during a warm autumn week, we stayed at the Park Hotel (Stadhouderskade 25; Tel: 31-20- 6711 222), across the street from the Singlegracht Canal and just five minutes walk from the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum.  The Hotel (below) is of modest size, very comfortable, modern, and popular for business;  the morning buffet at the Momo Restaurant (with children's menu)  is excellent and highly diverse. Nice touch: the hotel is completely non-smoking, as are all restaurants indoors in Amsterdam. The service personnel range from mildly cordial to occasionally lax. The amenities are of high quality--crisp linens and pillows, rainforest shower, flat screen TV, 24-hour gym,  work desk--and there's a good library in the lobby.  You can also rent bikes and scooters here, which will make you seem one of the locals. And one of the city's best high fashion streets is right around the corner from the hotel, on Hoofstraat, with all the principal European designer boutiques and a spanking new Taschen bookstore well worth visiting.      

     I dined well but did not have a chance to stay at the gorgeously renovated 111-room Hotel de L’Europe (Nieuwe Doelenstraat 2-14; Tel. 31-20-531-1777; left), built in 1896 on the former premises of an in  dating to 1638.  Overlooking the Amstel River, the hotel's stateliness, with Dutch master paintings from the collection of Freddy Heineken, has been lightened up and brought into the 21st century.  Back in 1940 the hotel was the backdrop for scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Foreign Correspondent.”
    Its restaurant Bord’Eau, which I will be reporting on soon, is one of the best new fine dining rooms in Europe, and the bar one of the most sophisticated.  At the moment, the hotel is offering a New Year's package (256 euros-499 euros) with a gala six-course dinner and magnum of Champagne.
        The hotel is also where, just outside its doors, you can rent a marvelous old classic wooden saloon boat through Privateboat Tours (31-20-684-9338; right), which will pick you up dockside and meander for an hour or so through the city, past numerous neighborhoods and sights. You can also book breakfast, snacks or a dinner cruise. It’s really enchanting, whether during the day or when the night comes over the city.  Rates, for various boats, run 200 euros to 350 euros for the first hour.

    The two must-see cultural institutions in town are the  Rijksmuseum (Jan Luykenstraat 1)  and  Van Gogh Museum (Paulus Potterstraat 14), both within walking yards of one another.  The former (below) has been in a state of needed restoration and expansion, so only a part of the museum is open for the time being; fortunately the directors have gathered the museum's very finest and most famous works together in those open rooms, and if you are deprived of seeing everything, a couple of hours in these splendid rooms will more than enchant you with a grandeur that demonstrates the dominance of 17th century Dutch art. In full view are all the masterpieces, including Rembrandt's newly lighted "Night Watch," an awesome number of exquisite Vermeers, Franz Hals portraits, landscapes, and so much more that will easily fill a morning or afternoon's visit.
    The Van Gogh Museum (below), a very modern, if not particularly attractive, structure, is a monumental tribute to one artist, whose progression from self-taught painter and imitator of his contemporaries to an artist of unique creativity is told room by room, and you can readily see how he struggled with his art, always learning, ever incorporating, constantly refining until his work looked like no one else's, then or now.  Critics'  overly excitable psycho-biographies of Van Gogh, with incidents of self-mutilation and his sad suicide, pale behind these extraordinary paintings, which are far more beautiful than they are mere personal statements of a man who was alternately deeply depressed and amazingly joyful.  The work, more than any of his era, speaks for itself.
  Then, of course, there is the Anne Frank House (below), commemorating the 15 year-old girl who lived through the Nazi Occupation and died in a concentration camp, but who wrote those immortal lines, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are basically good at heart."  
    Amsterdam is also home to a wide array of museums and cultural institutions, including the Historic Amsterdam Museum, which tells the story of Amsterdam and the Dutch; the Nieuwe Kerk, a Late Gothic church with an unfinished spire; the Nederlands Theater Museum; even a Woonboatmuseum, which exhibits what life on a houseboat was like, and a Hash Marijuana Hemp Museum with 1,000 artifacts.
    I heartily recommend that everyt beer lover, or anyone wondering how beer is made, visit  Heineken Experience (Stadhouderskade 78; 31 20 523 9483), a multi-storied interactive exhibition (below) that includes a section housing the copper-plated brewing equipment, and ending off with a chance not only to have a free beer, as part of the admission, but also to mingle with a young crowd that clearly has like-minded interests in socializing. There is also The House of Bols Cocktail & Genever Experience,  just across from the Van Gogh. During a self-guided tour you’ll learn the history of the genever company founded by Lucas Bols in 1575 and pass through a gorgeously lighted Hall of Taste (below) where you can touch and smell the ingredients that go into genever, and sniff from 36 “puffers” of flavorings from strawberry to white mint, coffee to peach. Then you end off at a bar/lounge called the World of Cocktails, where they’ll make you any of hundreds of cocktails made from scores of Bols genevers. There’s even a Ladies Night special discount, and you can sign up for the Bols Bartending Academy to become a registered bartender. You will also learn the proper way to drink genevers, which involves leaning over to take a sip from a full shot glass on the table without picking it up. And if you follow a beer with a chaser of genever, it’s called a kopstoot (headbutt) in Flanders.
    Also, visit one of the many "brown cafés," so-called because the barebones décor tends to be in that color. They are friendly neighborhood pubs, with limited food options, and most don't take credit cards.
    I suppose I cannot escape saying something about Amsterdam's notorious Red Light District, which  in all candor, I find distressing, but, if there is any degree of taste in such things, it is done with a modicum of it.  With the women arrayed like sideshow freaks  in storefronts and crowds of the curious filing by pointing fingers and snickering, it is a trail of nervous titillation, with plenty of porn and sex shops to go along with the sordidness of it all.
    But that kind of license is but a small part of Amsterdam's, and the Netherlands' liberal policies towards their own people, who know very well how to enjoy life and leave others to theirs. 
    One warning I picked up from an Amsterdammer: with the onset of global warming the water levels city's canals are unquestionably going to rise, and one look at the slight gap between current water levels and the sidewalks above them will tell you that the future is going to be problematic for this city built on water.  But I am also told the city fathers are looking into solutions, and something tells me that long before Venice comes to any conclusions about its own watery demise, Amsterdam will have found a way through the crisis. But go now, just to be sure.