When it comes to museums and Amsterdam, where do you start? The list is long and extraordinary. The National Museum of Spectacles. The Museum of Mechanical Player Pianos. The Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum. The Sex Museum. The KattenKabinet, a museum dedicated to cats in art. The Biblical Museum. And this is just a start. Scratch the surface and you’ll find even more bizarre collections to delight and amuse.

Electric Ladyland, the only museum in the world devoted to the wonders of fluorescence, is a good example of what one man and his obsession can achieve. Situated in a basement not far from Anne Frank’s house, visitors enter a room filled with strange, bulbous shapes that appear to have come from a magician’s nightmare. But when UV black lights are turned on, the shapes take on a different life as they shimmer and glow with fluorescence.

And this is when the serious fun starts, for visitors are encouraged to engage with the displays and take part in ‘participatory art’. This involves helping to create a piece of art and becoming, for the duration of the visit, a living piece of the work.

Complex, mind-bending stuff, so when you leave you’ll probably be in need of a visit to somewhere a bit more conventional, which, for Amsterdam, could be somewhere like In’t Aepjen, One of the oldest pubs in the city, it’s famous for the fact that sailors used to pay their bar bill with monkeys. Yes, real monkeys. But then this is Amsterdam, and people do things rather differently in this constantly surprising city.