The very organised citizens of Amsterdam arranged all their major cultural institutions on a very large, but somewhat bleak, plaza called Museumplein, no translation necessary. The Rijksmuseum (the one with the bikes in front of it) is the chief art museum of the Netherlands, and the definitive collection of Dutch and Flemish painting in the world. There's a very impressive Hall of Honour when you first walk in with gargantuan Rembrandts, but the rest of the museum is a bit confusing, endless white rooms arranged like a maze. And Dutch painting, to stereotype, is mostly very dark, smallish paintings of ugly people or fruit, so dozens of rooms full of these can wear you down a bit. While the Dutch have a very impressive artistic history, they are nowhere in music. The city belatedly tried to rectify this by building the nearby Concertgebouw, which supposedly has some of the best acoustics in the world.