Amsterdam's heart has a relatively ordered layout -- as any glance at the map will tell you. Imagine a horizontal line with a dip in the middle. The left-hand side of the line is the North Sea Canal, an engineering accomplishment of the first magnitude. The right-hand side of the line is the IJ River (pronounced "eye"), which once flowed into the brackish Zuiderzee and thence into the North Sea by a roundabout route that led north past Hoorn, Enkhuizen, and Den Oever. Today, the Zuiderzee is a fresh-water lake called the IJsselmeer in honor of this selfsame river. Along both sides of this line is a complex of piers, harbors, dry docks, warehouses, cranes, and other maritime facilities.

The dip in the middle of our hypothetical line marks the point at which an artificial island was built to receive the Centraal Station (1889). The medieval core of Amsterdam, marked by a confusion of waterways that have since been partially filled in (Damrak and Rokin were once canals), is directly below this dip and thus within a few minutes' walk of the station itself. Around this core you'll notice four semicircular rings of canals, with two more at a somewhat greater distance. Everything within the Lijnbaansgracht, or outermost canal, is called the Centrum; everything beyond belongs to the modern development of Amsterdam and is subdivided into West, Zuid (south), and Oost (east). With this noted, we seriously advise you to do your exploring with map in hand. The concentrically circular nature of the city's layout makes it terribly easy to start walking in exactly the opposite direction from the one you thought you were going.

The Centrum -- or inner Old Center -- is handily sliced in half into a westerly "New Side" and an easterly "Old Side" (with its enjoining former Jewish Quarter). This is where you will find the most famous attractions of Amsterdam. To most short-term visitors, the Museum District and Vondelpark are the city's furthest frontier, but on either side of these are two of the city's more vibrant neighborhoods: Jordaan to the west and the ultimately multicultural De Pijp to the east. Originally built to house immigrants and workers, these neighborhoods are probably the best places to go to get a sense of the real Amsterdam today.

There are a number of address endings that indicate the form of thoroughfare: a straat is a street; a laan is a lane; a gracht or sloot is a canal, though some of these have been filled in to provide more room for road traffic; a kade is a canal-side quay; and a dijk is a dike, though in the urban environment this is not always obvious. House numbers are counted from nearest the center of the city, with the Dam as epicenter. Unfortunately post codes do not adhere to a system that will help you navigate neighborhoods.