museum

The Willet-Holthuysen Museum: An elegant Golden Age house in Amsterdam

The Willet-Holthuysen Museum: An elegant Golden Age house in Amsterdam

Many tourists visiting Amsterdam come to see the beautiful buildings in the old center. The UNESCO site – officially called “the Seventeenth-Century Canal Ring Area of Amsterdam inside the Singelgracht” – is lined with elegant “Golden Age” houses. It’s very picturesque and very Instagrammable. You can see a few of them on the inside: one…

Amsterdam Historical Museum

Amsterdam Historical Museum

I visited the Amsterdam Historical Museum (more properly just called the Amsterdam Museum) as an afterthought. It was on my list: one of the many small museums and other sights to see in Amsterdam that I like to visit and write about. That day, though, I wanted to see Below the Surface, an archeological exhibit…

Wick Heritage Museum, Scotland

Wick Heritage Museum, Scotland

The leaflet advertising the Wick Heritage Museum compares the museum to the TARDIS. If you’re a Doctor Who fan, you’ll know exactly what that means: Doctor Who’s form of transportation, a blue police box (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), is bigger on the inside than the outside. Outside, the museum is small and unimpressive:…

The Communist Consumers Museum

The Communist Consumers Museum

A Communist Consumers Museum? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? I mean, in the Cold War, we in the West were the consumer society. We still are. They were, well, communist. So what could a Communist Consumers Museum even show? When we passed through Timişoara, Romania, this summer, we didn’t really have any plans. Picking…

The Houseboat Museum, Amsterdam

The Houseboat Museum, Amsterdam

If you’ve ever wandered the UNESCO World Heritage-listed canal rings of Amsterdam, you’ve noticed the many houseboats moored along the canals. Have you ever wondered what they’re like on the inside? What’s it like to live in a houseboat? The Houseboat Museum Amsterdam gives a glimpse of that life: a very quick glimpse, given how…

Berlin’s Palace of Tears

Berlin’s Palace of Tears

Walking into the Palace of Tears is stepping back in time. The floor tiles, the wall clock, the “modern” design of the building: all hearken back to a 1960s aesthetic in interior design. Standing on East German territory since 1962, the Palace of Tears was an addition to the older Friedrichstraße train station. This station…

The Medieval Museum of Stockholm

The Medieval Museum of Stockholm

Back in the 1970s, the Swedish Parliament planned to build a garage underground next to the Parliament building in Stockholm. As often happens in European cities, the construction stopped when excavation uncovered the remains of what turned out to be the original medieval center of Stockholm. For two years, archeologists excavated and studied the city wall, built by…

Old Dubai: a quick visit

Old Dubai: a quick visit

While I didn’t do any shopping in Dubai, I did manage a quick walk around the Bastakiya District: also known as Old Dubai. Dubai was originally a small port that made its living from pearl diving, fishing and trade, especially with Iran. Besides the nomadic Bedouins, who lived in tents, the populations who settled here…

The Chocolate Museum, Guadeloupe

The Chocolate Museum, Guadeloupe

Just seeing the bright hand-painted sign above the entrance to La Maison du Cacao (The Chocolate Museum) in Pointe Noire, Guadeloupe, was enough to make me happy. The truth is that pretty much anything chocolate-related makes me happy. I’m an addict. Disclosure: This article contains an affiliate link. If you make a purchase through the…

Visiting Valor in Villajoyosa

Visiting Valor in Villajoyosa

Last spring in Guadeloupe I visited an archeological park where I got to sample the pulp from a fresh-picked cacao pod. I heard more about chocolate cultivation at two coffee plantations. Given my obsession with chocolate, I decided to take the process a step further on my short visit to the Costa Blanca in Spain,…