We decided to skip the hostel breakfast, walked through the Vondelpark and out the south end on van Baerlestraat. We turned into the fancy shopping street PC Hooftstraat and tried to find a bakery, but the only food places among the upscale shops seemed to be upscale restaurants, and none were open yet. We went down as far as Concertgebouw, and the skies were threatening. We finally found one on van Baerlestraat, a half block below where we had turned, and there was a nearby specialty coffee shop that looked pretty good. I admired the Probat roaster in front, and the display of espresso machines and accessories in back. My cappuccino was merely okay.
The rain held off until we had finished breakfast, but came and went as we walked down to the Van Gogh museum. This turned out to be an open airy white structure, spacious but not sterile. The paintings of the artist, arranged roughly chronologically, were leavened by other works of the time from Theo's collection. We crossed over into a spanking new wing with a small Japanese exhibit (the wing was underwritten by a Japanese bank), and a large and rather lame exhibit of some French Second Empire painter and sculptor which we mostly skipped. As a promotion to tie in with the Japanese exhibit, the museum cafe was offering premade sushi for lunch -- it was not stellar but the other lunch selections were exactly (exactly!) the same as at the Rijksmuseum.
A little way down the street was the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art. There was nothing really exceptional here -- minor works by artists we knew, lots of works by local artists we didn't -- but the kids had great fun, as they nearly always do when faced with art of this sort. To get a sense of the town, we caught the number 20 "circle tram" which skirted the edge of the old city. What we saw seemed only to verify that other neighbourhoods looked similar to the ones we had seen. We got off at Rembrandtplein and walked up to the Kalverstraat shopping street, peeking at a small supermarket (always a favourite pastime of ours when abroad), going across at Spui and down Leidsestraat (with a brief stop for N to buy some Ecco shoes which were on sale). Our dinner destination was Bojo, just down the street from Puri Mas and close to the hostel. This time we ordered a la carte: beef rendang, noodles with beef, pork in soya sauce, and the seafood special. It was quite a lot of food, quite inexpensive, and quite tasty. Then it was back to the hostel to pack and prepare for departure.