Heading to Europe from Venezuela caused a great deal of sticker shock.  Even after the new currency came out on 1 January, knocking three zeroes off of the Bolivar, greenbacks still traded at five to one on the black market, and, even in Caracas, $30 a day proved to be more than adequate to get by on.

By the time my friend and I reached the Netherlands, $30 yielded only about 20 euros, and that's less than I spent each day just on our twin shared hotel room.  Add in food, drinks, and an occasional trip to a coffeeshop, and it proved hard to get by on much less than $75 per day.  And that figure doesn't include the often quite dear admission prices charged by many of the wonderful museums that help make this gorgeous city one of my favorite travel destinations in the world.

Luckily for us yanks, Amsterdam does offer a number of free attractions.  While they may not have the splendor of the Rijksmuseum or the Stedelijk, both those world-class venues charge in the neighborhood of $15 admission, and, besides, both were partially closed for renovations during my visit anyway.

While it is easy to while away hours without spending a single euro cent by wandering the breathtaking canals in this city, one of the most beautiful in the world, come January the weather gets a bit chilly and it sometimes becomes necessary to seek refuge from the cold.  Free attractions like the Multatuli Museum provide the prefect respite from the weather as well as foreign exchange rates.

This small institution tucked down a side street off Herengracht in the western canal belt just a ten minute walk or one tram stop from Centraal Station.  It features a small collection of personal effects once owned by Multatuli, the Dutch writer born Eduard Douwes Dekker in 1820.  He began his career as a civil servant in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), where he worked for 18 years.

After seeing the way native and Dutch rulers treated the people of the vast and beautiful archipelago, he returned to the Netherlands disillusioned in 1856.  Determined to unmask the oppression he had witnessed, he began to write pamphlets and newspaper articles about it, but few paid him any mind until the 1860 publication of his satirical novel Max Havelaar.

Widely read throughout Europe, this work exposed the exploitation of slave labor in the East Indies and provoked a defensive response from colonial apologists.  Multatuli published another satirical work, Love Letters, in 1861  and continued his literary career for the same length of time as he had worked in the Indies, 18 years, before retiring to Germany, where he died in a red chaise lounge in 1887.  In 2002 he was recognized as the greatest Dutch writer of all time by the Society for Dutch Literature.

The museum dedicated to him hold a small collection of his personal effects, including a globe, his personal library in a beautiful wood and glass display case, his writing desk, engravings and portraits, the chaise lounge where he died and the urn which, for a time, held his ashes.  There is also a small room for rotating exhibits, which at the time of my visit contained a collection of books.

Passing back past Centraal Station into the Eastern part of the waterfront area leads to a small museum zone where the Amsterdam Shipping Museum is housed and where the temporary home of the Stedelijk is while the architectural wonder that is its permanent home on the Museumplein to the south is being renovated and expanded to meet future needs.

Since I was not interested in shipping or seeing a partial collection of the modern art that has made the Stedelijk world-famous, and was trying to save a bit of cash, I decided to head to the ARCAM Architectuurcentrum Amsterdam, which is located in a modernist building right on the water's edge.

The center hosts rotating exhibitions in its airy space with lots of glass overlooking the calm waters of the Oosterdok.  During my visit, for which there was no entrance fee, a maze of displays had been set up with a treasure trove of information about the past, present, and future of urban planning in Bogota, Colombia.  Perhaps owing to the high level of English literacy in the Netherlands, the entire exhibit was presented in my mother tongue, and I enjoyed seeing the wonderful, large photographs and reading about the plans for the gem of a South American capital which I hope to see firsthand one day soon.

While, especially as an American suffering under our economy as it slides seemingly inexorably toward third world status, it is impossible to avoid shelling out the big bucks to see the best of what Amsterdam's artistic and cultural heritage has to offer, there are still a few ways to pass the days and keep the euros firmly in your wallet.

Joshua C. Robinson

jrobinson@riseup.net