The Lloyd Hotel in the Eastern Docklands is a showcase for the best of Dutch design, from furniture by Marcel Wanders to breathtaking boiled-wool fabric by Claudy Jongstra.
With the help of some hair dye and lessons in language and decorum, Princess Maxima resembles a Netherlandish royal—but she's a born-and-bred Argentinean who worked in banking until her marriage to Crown Prince Willem-Alexander in 2002.
The Dutch use English profanities with aplomb—in their own language, true insults involve wishing gruesome diseases on someone.
At the Prostitute Information Center, run by ex-prostitute Mariska Majoor, visitors can see a mock-up of a typical window room.
There are 206 paintings by Van Gogh hanging on museum walls in the city compared with just 22 paintings by Rembrandt.
Amsterdam is also known as the Venice of the North, and has more canals than the Italian city.
The water in Amsterdam's canals is completely refreshed every three days.
The movie Ocean's Twelve was shot in and around the Hotel Pulitzer, the Kloveniersburgwal and Heiligeweg. A key scene was filmed in De Dampkring coffeeshop on the Handboogstraat.
Rembrandt had to leave his home and declare bankruptcy because the company that commissioned his painting The Night Watch was dissatisfied with it. The painting is now hailed as one of Rembrandt's masterpieces and can be seen at the Rijksmuseum.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Madonna and David Bowie are all rumored to have residences in Mokum city.
Centraal Station is supported by 8,687 wooden stakes, which were pounded into three artificial islands built to support it.
New York's Bowery district is named after the Dutch word for a farm, bouwerij, and Stuyvesant Street after Peter Stuyvesant, whose statue stands outside Amsterdam's West Indisch Huis.
