I arrive in Amsterdam just as Pride Week is kicking off. The streets are heaving and rainbow flags flop above the roofs. Shaven-headed men in vests and ill-fitting shorts. Tattooed women with rainbow-facepaint and piercings. One young woman cycles past chanting ‘Beats, beats, beats, beat, BEATS!’. The sun is shining and there is indeed the faint sound of distant festival drum and bass vibrating across the city. I am feeling old and overdressed.

We are hemmed in by brick. So many bricks. Massive civic buildings that in other cities would be concrete and wood are here ornate stacks of red or gray – a Legotown tribute to the mercantile might of the old burghers.

The noisy clickety clack of my wheelie-suitcase shouts of more brick – every pavement an arrangement of bricky unevenness. All the space in the street is given over to trams and cycles and boats. They have smooth passage and seem to glide through the city with minimum friction and fuss. Pedestrians are corralled on to narrow pavements with shop entrances every five yards. Pastry is on sale everywhere. There is almost as much bread as brick. It’s hard to fight through the crowds that gather round each outlet, each local swarm triggered by whiffs of cake, Danish, loaf and roll.

The centre of town is teeming. The clack-clack-clack of the pedestrian crossing alerts you to the moments when the streets are safe to cross. The bike bells ring when it’s not. Tourists stop to take photos of canal boats, bicycles, each other. Groups of young men on stag-dos bar the way, shouting and pointing in the direction of the next bar. The locals stand and wait for the next tram. I sense their looks of pity and disdain as I struggle past – the idiot who tries to walk through the city in the middle of a summer Saturday with his clickity-clack luggage and uncalled-for anorak.

Less than an hour later, I am alone in front of a Vermeer. A woman in an exquisitely painted blue smock – the unseen window light playing games with the fabric – is reading a letter intently, perhaps unaware she is being watched, studied, captured.

The image is startlingly immediate, though centuries old, almost like a photograph. And as you look and look and look, the painterly obsession with blue deepens – the blue of a chair close by the window, another blue chair in shadow, the blue of a chunky dowel weighting down a wall tapestry, or is it a canvas map? It’s a blur of brown and cream – as is the woman’s hair and face and yet she shines out from the background with mysteriously clarity – the painter’s magic to make a blue jump out from blue, a beige jump out of beige…

I am interrupted by an Asian boy who would like me to take a photo of him in front of the painting. I take his phone and frame him next to the woman in blue, a rictus grin on his face, the fabric of his striped sports shirt less real than the Vermeer smock. He thanks me and walks off.  I see him next with his back to a Rembrandt, having another photo of his grin taken by a stranger.

Sunday morning early, and what a difference. It is raining and the streets are empty. No people, no bikes, the occasional half-empty tram. A few up-all-nighters stand in doorways sheltering from the drizzle. Dedicated pastry addicts wait for the bakeries to open. Dodging around piles of garbage and sunken-brick puddles I make my way to the Central Station. a magnet, like all central train stations, for the dodgy and the damaged. The road up to the station is a mix of beardy old men, scouring the pavement for fag-butts, and healthy-looking Interrailers heaving themselves towards the early trains. I am fortunate to be with the latter – my face seems to fit so well with the former. I am a debit card and a QR code away from the gutter. My train to Köln is terminating at Düsseldorf. I will have to jump to a local train and hope to make it to my hotel in time to dump the bags and seek out a place to watch the football.