A Valentine's weekend in Amsterdam

Spend the short daylight in the Nine Streets, the lanes across the 17th-century canal belt that turn, in February, into a string of warm lit windows: independent shops, bookshops, a café each time one of you admits to being cold. Drift on to the Bloemenmarkt on the Singel. It sells more bulbs and souvenirs than cut flowers now, but you can still walk out with tulips in midwinter. Finish at dusk on the Reguliersgracht crossing, looking down seven arched bridges outlined in lights and doubled in the water. Five minutes, free, no reservation.

If the rain settles in for the night, walk two minutes from the Reguliersgracht to the Tuschinski, a 1921 cinema that is an Art Deco fever dream inside: carpets, lamps, curved balconies, and a main auditorium people photograph more than the film. Films run in their original language with Dutch subtitles, so an English-language film stays in English.

On a wet weekday out of season you can stand before a Vermeer for five minutes without being moved along, a different museum from the summer crush. Walk the Gallery of Honour, the Dutch Golden Age in one long room with Rembrandt's Night Watch at the end, then choose one more wing that pulls you both: delftware and dollhouses, ship models, the Asian pavilion. Leave while you still want more. Book a timed ticket online even in winter; on a rainy weekend, everyone else has had your idea.

Founded in 1638 as a medicinal physic garden, its outdoor beds are bare now, but the glasshouses are humid, green, and thirty degrees warmer than the street, with a butterfly house alongside. The best-value winter refuge in the city.

Then board a winter canal cruise, the rare outdoor plan that bad weather improves. Most operators run glass-roofed, heated boats all winter, so rain drumming on the roof becomes part of the evening while lit gables slide past. Smaller boats suit two far better. Book an after-dark departure and ask whether the boat is covered.

Museum Van Loon keeps a patrician canal house intact: portraits, period rooms, a grand staircase, and out the back a formal garden and coach house that nobody expects. A small, unhurried hour for a last afternoon.