Amsterdam's 7 Oddest Museums

Everyone goes to gape at Van Gogh and ogle Rembrandt. But where are the neck violins and fluorescent rabbits? The bong displays and erotic music boxes? Amsterdam has a sublime assortment of oddball museums. 

1. Kattenkabinet: Art devoted to cats – including works by Picasso and Rembrandt – hangs in this creaky old canal house.

2. Tassenmuseum Hendrikje: The Museum of Handbags and Purses shows arm candy throughout the ages, with lots of sparkling celebrity clutches.

3. Torture Museum: Spooky galleries display skull crackers, finger screws, a guillotine and the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg.

4. Sexmuseum Amsterdam: Good silly fun, especially the penis-encircled baptismal font and automated farting flasher.

5. Electric Lady Land: The world’s first museum of fluorescence lays out glow-in-the-dark rocks, rice and rabbits. Trippy!

6. Pianola Museum: Listen to rare jazz and classical tunes unroll on vintage player pianos.

7. Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum: Ganja galore in the Red Light District. Browse the whopping pipe collection and roomful of big-budded plants, then send an e-postcard of yourself in a pot field.

Museum Day Outcast #3: Fluorescent Museum

The world's first museum of fluorescence is a hippie-trippy treat. It's called Electric Ladyland, and it radiates in Amsterdam. Even if you didn't eat a space cake before arriving, you're gonna feel like it, as grey-ponytailed artist and owner Nick Padalino takes you to his gallery/shop's basement and shows you all kinds of glow-in-the-dark objects, from psychedelic sculptures to luminescent rocks.

Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles' 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' and other tunes play on the stereo while you learn about the naturally fluorescent rabbit, and wow your friends with the fact that the most fluorescent place on earth is…drum roll…New Jersey, USA (lots of incandescent minerals in the ground there).