Yesterday I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, as usual there was a queue outside which at a guess would have taken around an hour to get in. The queue was only just out of the gates, unlike last time when it stretched 100 meters down the road. The museum is good but no way would I queue for 2 hours to get in.

Luckily we had our tickets from museum night which gave us fast entry so we didn’t need to queue up which was great. You get the preferential treatment if you buy your tickets online.

The ground floor is the most interesting with information on the colonies of the Dutch, their relationships with the Spanish, the Golden era and how they lost it all. There were a few open questions in my mind after the visit, such as how Suriname returned back to the hands of the Dutch after the British controlled it and how and when other colonies were returned.

Thinking of colonies I’m not sure what was happening in Amsterdam this weekend, but we saw lots of children in fancy dress with black faces, presumably it has something to do with the slave trade. I’m not to sure on their motivation for this event but it doesn’t seem like the sort of act to be celebrating.

I was surprised to see an exhibition inside of Damien Hirst. After queuing up for about 30 minutes where we were squeezed into a pitch black room. I realised that in fact this was the only piece of work. I’m not too sure what I thought of Damien Hirst’s “For the Love of God”. It did look amazing with the way the light reflects of the diamonds, Photos here of the £50 million disco ball. I’ll let you decide on this one.