Bruges? Brussels? Other?
I’ve never been to the Netherlands and will be in Amsterdam for 5 days on one leg of a vacation.
It was 20 years ago but we did 3 days in Amsterdam, 2 days in Brussels and a day in Bruges. We enjoyed all three cities!
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I heard Bruges is fantastic but extremely crowded from early afternoon until early evening since most people just do day trips.
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Don’t know if they’d hold any interest for you, but I thought that the sea gates were fascinating.
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Bruges. Take a morning train there and just enjoy the day. It’s really a very pretty and interesting city.
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I visited all 3 cities this past spring.
Bruges and Brussels are very different but great things to experience in each.
Whichever you chose, do take a walking tour.
In Bruge there was a walking and canal boat ride combo that was terrific.
We spent hours in the Music Instrument museum in Brussels. Loved it.
Go on a canal tour with ‘Those Dam Boat Guys’ in Amsterdam.
Enjoy!
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We took the train from Amsterdam to Bruges last week. It’s about three hours taking the Eurostar to Brussels and then transferring to a regional to Bruges. It would be a tough day trip, with too much travel and not enough time to see the city. We spent two nights there and wished we had stayed for three. We stayed five nights in Amsterdam and felt like we had barely scratched the surface. Have fun!
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I am am currently at Schiphol airport as a write this. If you want to stay in the Netherlands there are several nice day trip or overnight options.
Consider asking about the waterland area or the North Sea coast. Both are beautiful, less traveled and accessible.
Here is the coast…
And a few of the Waterland towns scenery…
Great areas to rent a bike, do water sports and go “local”.
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The Hague is an easy train ride from Amsterdam… charming city, Mauritshuis museum is world class, you can take a tram to the beach if you want to walk around a gorgeous resort area. Don’t kill a day in transit… Rotterdam is a fun day trip as well but fewer cool things to do there…
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Another vote for The Hague. Over the years on visits to Amsterdam we also enjoyed trips via train to Delft (a short tram ride from The Hague), Leiden, Gouda, the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen.
In Amsterdam we took a tour with Mikes Bikes which was fun. Also lots of museums to visit.
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Bruges is delightful. Feels like you’re in a fairy tale. Take a canal tour. Eat a ton of chocolate. Window shop the chocolate stores.
Brussels–the Grand-Place looks like Disney at night. The music museum is fascinating .
Brussels seems sort of schizophrenic–you can be in an area of industrial type buildings (where our hotel was located) and then be transported back in time within blocks. We had a great time.
Belgium has 650 different beers–and they are all good (I personally tested quite a number of them!)
Amsterdam–do the Heineken Experience–quite fun! Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh museum.
I don’t think you can go wrong no matter what you choose!
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Not to digress but this is a view of The Hague from down the coast. Beautiful beaches and under appreciated coast line.
Note the windmills in the distance.
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Thank you all for the thoughtful responses. I must say that the advice on Bruges weighs on my mind (crowds of day trippers and time spent getting there). Sounds like a bit much and it will be the third leg of the trip. Spending a bit of money on Amsterdam hotel to just blow off a night at this point, so it will be a day trip for sure. The Hague sounds like the best combo of time/things to see. Though - and I know this is stupid - I wanted to see the Bruges Madonna because of Monument Men. 
@Catcherinthetoast - my man, I’m sure we were at Schiphol at the same time yesterday. We flew in direct yesterday and are on our way east this morning, then working our way west and ending back here in Amsterdam to fly home. Amsterdam for 5 days, staying in the city.
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Sent you a DM. Safe travels.
Trip update. We are enjoying Amsterdam immensely; but we are also very tired. Too many hotels, flights and trains, which has finally caught up to us. We’ll save the day trip for another time and just keep exploring this marvelous city. Sorry - I would have loved to have reported back. But 3 weeks is about my limit for being away from home.
Fun trip detail - saw an SNL lead at the restaurant by the Rijksmuseum and again in the museum. My D was starstruck. Me, not so much. I’m not a regular viewer anymore and can’t picture him in a skit.
It will be a while before we go to another museum (except as noted below), but seeing the Dutch masters and their use of light really impressed.
For me, because I’m a bit of an Anglophile, the British Museum has been the highlight of the whole trip. The Elgin Marbles was a bucket list item for me, and I wanted the kids to see them. Making plans to go to Greece in the next couple of years to see the Athens collection.
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I think trip length is hard. It takes a long time to get there so you’ll want to see things because when will you get back. But it’s exhausting and home is nice.
I agree about the Dutch Masters, the light play is pretty amazing
What’s nice about the Rijksmuseum is the “greatest hits” gallery as you enter. If you have limited time and don’t want to miss the Vermeers, Steens, Rembrandts, etc., you just go straight and dip into the alcoves if you see something interesting. It culminates with The Night Watch at the end of the gallery. I hope you got to see the dollhouses–we had seen The Miniaturist on PBS and that gallery brought the series to life.
At the British Museum, what we enjoyed best was the displays of finds from Saxon England. As fans of Detectorists, we imagined the regular folks who found this stuff and sold it to the museum—no looting of foreign countries. The Sutton Hoo find was really neat (another movie link, The Dig, on Netflix!)
The Rosetta Stone was like the Mona Lisa—huge crowds around it, and we couldn’t get close enough to appreciate it. Did not expect to see an Easter Island figure there—man, those Brits took everything, didn’t they!!
You mentioned the Elgin Marbles—I found that gallery to be very arrogant, in that the room is the exact dimensions of the Parthenon, and the stone fragments are positioned in the same positions they occupied on the Parthenon. Not only did the British steal the marbles, they are seemingly bragging about it in the design of the room.
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We caught the big stuff and, yes, the doll houses.
I thought the British Museum’s set up for the marbles was a testament to the respect the British had/have for the history of classical Greece. As for stealing and the ongoing controversy about the BM board’s steadfast refusal to send the marbles back to Athens, we could do a whole other thread on that topic, which is an interesting point of discussion indeed.
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LOTS to do in Amsterdam. We had 2 nights there before a Viking river cruise and saw a lot… but we’d love to get back there again someday.
Last Sept at the Rijksmuseum, our travel buddy was really looking forward to a return view of “The Night Watch”. Alas, it was in the midst of restoration / vibration measurement efforts. We could still see it, but lots of glass and scaffolding around it.
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