Short: A few hours in Amsterdam

January 2026 and Louy had booked a cruise on the Ambition, one of the ports of call was Amsterdam, not too far for me to drive so Onno, Vadym and myself went to meet him in Amsterdam.

We had a small lunch in the Bakkerij Westers in the Hotel Jakarta right opposite the cruise berth at the Javakade. This place has some nice models of the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Oranje and Banda.

When it was time to say goodbye to Louy we remained near the cruise terminal to see the ship leave port before going back home.

TIP! (and complaint) Be prepared to pay way too much money for parking, I basically spent about 5 hours and the parking fee was almost 34 euro! Like most cities in Belgium and the Netherlands (probably some more countries), Amsterdam has followed the trend of reducing parking spaces, making the fewer parking areas 10 times more expensive to force people away from driving cars and rely completely on failing public transport, SHAME ON EUROPE! Antwerp and Brussels are holding on to the rubbish Low Emission Zones (unless you pay of course! How that exactly helps the environment is questionable to say the least!) Antwerp now has restricted roadside paid parking only to residents living within a specific zone, visitors are forced to use larger public carparks. One of these used to be just opposite the MAS museum next to the historic port cranes at 6 euro for a whole day, of course that was too cheap for the city officials and they now decided to close it down, forcing everyone to use the already overcrowded city carparks at 4.30 euro per hour! It looks like Europe is trying to force people to stop using and even owning cars, making sure there are costs involved at every part about owning and driving a car, SHAME ON EUROPE!