The concept of the ope-air museum

When we were in the beginning stages of our Europlanning (reading guide books, looking up things on Google, and such), we determined that an average daily allowance for museum/attraction visits would be $50. If you want to do the math on that be our guest, we're going for 45 actual vacation days.

But what has been so wonderful about Europe so far are the open-air museums. We learned of open-air museums in Paris by chance, but didn't know the formal term until our host in Amsterdam, Jan (pronounced Yawn), enlightened us.

Jan was apologizing for the Dutch weather, practically pleading with is not to hold it against our stay. We were assuring him that we had no intentions of letting the cold and rain stop us for exploring the city; we were going ahead! Delighted he said, "Very good! It would have been very sad for you to miss the open-air museum!" We asked for him to expand; where were these museums? What are the hours of operation? Jan laughed at us. He exclaimed, shaking his head "No, no, no! The city IS the museum! No charge; no hours! Just Amstetdam."

After bidding Jan goodnight, we had a laugh at ourselves. How funny he is, I thought. The city is a museum...

Now we are in our 4th city, and I have completely grapsed the open-air concept. I was flipping through my camera pictures of the journey so far, and realized that 70% of my pictures are taking outside.  I also realized how much money we have NOT spend on museums or art galleries. It's not that we do not like those things... or that we have neglected our history and culture education. It's simply that Jan was right. The cities themselves are museum, with architectural history and grandness.

We've been taking free tours  (and tipping our tour guide) in every city. This is costing us closer to $25 a day... But what's even better than saving money is what we are experiencing! We are learning so much about the background and the cultivation of each new place. We have a tour of Prague thus afternoon. It is a tour of the open-air museum that is the city. And, as Providence would have it, it is shaping up to be a really beautiful Spring day.