One part of Amsterdam that struck me as not being able to group easily with either the city center or the canal ring is the area east of the town center where the botanical garden, the Amsterdam zoo, the new city hall and performing arts center, and the old Jewish quarter are located. I had planned to spend more time in the area but ran into an issue I wasn't expecting when it came down to trying to see a few of the sights on my last day in town. That was the national holiday, Koningsdag or King’s Day, and all the attractions other than the big three museums on the Museumplein were closed.

The Pre-WWII Jewish Quarter looks to have a few interesting sights between the Great Portuguese Synagogue, the Jewish Museum, and the Hollandse Shouwburg, a theater were Jews rounded up by the Nazis during WWII were held before deportation, all available to tour on a single ticket . I put them off until later largely because they weren’t covered on my Museum Card which got me into most museums in the country at no charge. I also didn’t make it into the Rembrandthuis, a nice looking house with an intricate medieval/renaissance-looking façade and lots of shutters, where Rembrandt lived for twenty years at the height of his popularity, another major Amsterdam attraction. I tried to make up for that, though, by eating dinner at the next door Rembrandt Café, one of the few restaurants I came across in the Netherlands that specializes in Dutch cuisine.

A significant attraction now in the area is the Hermitage Amsterdam at the Amstelhof, an old almshouse for elderly women that became a hospital until its facilities were no longer adequate. Yes, the use determined for it is as an annex to the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and it consists mostly of exhibition space for revolving special shows from the Hermitage’s collections. While I was in town the two big shows were "1917: From Romanovs to Revolution", one more of historical artifacts and documents chronicling the royal family Russian Revolution than of artworks, and “Portrait Gallery of the Golden Age” which appropriately covered Dutch portraiture, especially group portraiture of the 1600s.

After I left the Hermitage I walked a few blocks over toward the Jewish Quarter to see if by some chance the Synagogue or Jewish Museum might be open later than 5:00 P.M. They were not, but I came across a big group of Hasidic Jewish men dressed in black coats and hats and coiffed with long hair almost exactly like the subjects of the paintings in the Hermitage. It was like suddenly stepping into one of those paintings.