one long post about five days in Amsterdam

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With help from my son.

It was a family trip - multi-generational - my mom and stepfather (in their sixties), my wife A. and son K., who turned six while on the trip.

Sunday - Day One – Amsterdam Arrival

It was Sunday and 3PM by the time we checked into our AirBnB. We had been travelling for almost 24 hours, from two plane rides, a train, a tram, a walk, and finally arrived at the place. Then two flights of narrow spiral stairs. It turned out to be a beautiful place, with high windows and airy rooms. We had a kitchen, a living room, and four bedrooms. It was perfect. My parents each took their own bedroom to spread out in, and K. had his own “kids” room to sleep in. I have rented homes before – I loved that this one had been cleared of unnecessary knick-knacks and clutter. In fact, with its neutral black, gray and white décor, I found it to be quite inspirational design-wise, mixing a large wooden farmhouse table, for example, with black IKEA chairs.

K’s memories of the place we stayed in Amsterdam: “We had three floors, that were two rooms on every floors, and like one bathroom on two floors, and one of the bathrooms on the top had a shower. And one of the rooms at the top was mine. “

On our first day, A. and I went out to buy coffee and stroopwaffles from the grocery store. We learned something very important about the Netherlands. There is a thing called Maestro, which seems like a local credit card. A lot of places take Maestro and nothing else. So, we ended up having to leave our groceries at the register and go to an ATM machine.

My stepdad mentioned that he wanted a steakhouse, so we found a traditional Dutch steakhouse, had the local beer. I wasn’t all that hungry but the food was good. K was so tired, he fell asleep right at the table and missed dinner. A. carried him home, where he proceeded to wake up exclaiming his dinner was gone.

Monday Day Two – Amsterdam

We started the day with a canal cruise, which was included with our IAMSTERDAM cards. We found the back deck and spent most of it relaxing rather than listening to the guide.

“The canal cruise, before it started, on the boat, you saw a boat that was picking up bikes and different dirty stuff. And then the canal cruise, if you went inside, you could have headphones and you could listen to the stuff that they were talking about, of the history when you passed by was really special” - K.

Then we had lunch at the COBRA cafe on the MuseumPlein. We discovered the amazing sandwiches of Amsterdam. My stepfather was joking with the waitresses as usual, and as sometimes happens, the humor doesn't translate. Anyway, when she brings back our silverware/napkins, she doesn't give him one. "No fork for you!". It couldn't have been more similar to the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. Anyway, turned out he didn't get silverware as he had a "tosti", which is a panini basically. But it was funny and we laughed about it all week.

Rijksmuseum - I had no idea but my stepfather is a huge fan of the "Night Watch" painting and talked about how much he wanted to see it. In fact, Rembrandt is a big influence on his photography, the play of light and dark. So of course we had to go! My mom and I also watned to checked out the special exhibit on fashion magazines, featuring early fashion magazines from the 18th , 19th and early 20th century. And A. and I wanted to see the Asian wing of course. Did I mention I had sprained my ankle? By the time we got here, I was hopping on one foot. It was pretty pathetic. Luckily between advil, ice and wrapping my ankle, I was better in a day.

“The Night Watch was a really famous painting there. It was real life, and was very big. When it went to the museum, they cut off a part and that was the painter. They cut off the person who was painting the picture. So…” - K

Tuesday Day Three – Amsterdam

We took the bus out to Zaanse Schanse. I can only describe this as a Disney-land version of Holland. Many historical windmills have been moved there, and a village has been maintained with traditional shops and factories. It is similar to Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. People do actually live there, in the village, but they have to keep their homes looking a certain way and put up with tourists peering into their gardens. It really looked the way you imagine Holland looking, and of course, there was a wooden shoe factory (I resisted!), and a bakery (did not resist). We enjoyed the sheep, the ducks, and other wildlife. In addition to us, there were about a million Chinese tourists there. In fact, most signs were in Chinese first, followed by English and other languages.

I did like going into the old windmills and marveling at the technology they achieved with wind alone. They had big pieces of machinery operating ONLY on wind.

“The windmill place – you got to go INSIDE the windmills but some windmills you could only go in one, but I went into two, and one of them was really bad for five year olds – you had to be six but I wasn’t six but I was turning six soon, and there was a ladder, and people were coming up the down way, and then we went down. And the windmills were pretty nice views, but you couldn’t really go inside most of them, we actually couldn’t go inside, because we didn’t buy the entrance.”

The funny thing is – there is an express bus (the 891) on the way there, twenty minutes, but to return to Amsterdam, you have to take the slow bus (391) which takes forty-five minutes.

Once we got back to the Centraal station, we split up. My mom and S. went off to find a quilt store, and A. and I decided to walk back and explore a new neighborhood. I wanted to visit the “Oude Kirk”, which is in the Red Light District. It’s a neat old church, more interesting than most. I wanted to see the oldest neighborhoods in Amsterdam, but I didn’t really care about seeing the red light district. First we stumbled up the sailor’s neighborhood, or maybe it was the gay district judging from all the rainbow flags, or maybe it was Chinatown. We found an amazing Sichuan restaurant. It was divine. Turned out to be Michelin-Starred. Tasted like that too. Then we found a Chinese temple and visited it. We also ended up on the narrow street with the most red-light windows. Woops! I just told K. to look straight ahead and walk fast. Oops! Well, he probably didn’t know there is anything wrong with it, just seeing women in their underwear probably doesn’t seem all that strange to him.

I am pretty sure that on this night, we went out on our own, and took another evening canal cruise by ourselves (A. & I), which was so lovely. We had an indoor seat, and listened to the whole tour, which was a bit longer and included banter and music, as well as beer. K. had the chance to eat out with his grandparents (pizza), while we skipped dinner but did end up getting some amazing fries after getting lost in the De Pijp district.

“My favorite thing about travelling with grandma and grampa: Having pizza with them in Amsterdam was yummy. And eating with gramma and grampa was really fun.”

Wednesday

We went to the Artis zoo and to the TroppenMuseum. It was a very long walk, mostly because we went FAR out of our way. The zoo was beautiful, like most European zoos, but also a bit more special. It is in an old park for the nobility and while it’s a modern zoo, there’s also an “old” feeling to it. I enjoyed it a lot, especially seeing some animals I hadn’t seen before.

“At the zoo, you could see lots and lots of animals, and in one part, the aquarium part, I saw a red lionfish and a shark.” “The shark was not as big as usual sharks. I don’t know if it was a grownup or a kid or a baby shark, but it looked like it was going to be smaller than most sharks in the world. Way smaller.The animals that I thought were in the midnight zone, were actually in the rainforest.”

The Troppen Museum is dedicated to the Dutch colonies, different places around the world from the Carribean to Indonesia. A didn’t really enjoy it but I got into it, especially the musical instrument section. However ti was under construction so the legendary children’s section wasn’t much there anymore. However, we did get to watch the story of the Ramayana and I loved how entranced K was by that story.

It was a pretty exhausting day – pretty sure that THIS was the day that we had Indonesian food. At Tempo Doloe. We managed to get there at opening and score a table that wasn’t reserved for another 1.5 hours. We got the big “Rice Table” (can’t spell the Dutch version of the word), and ate every bite.

Thursday

We went for a bike ride. We rented bikes at MAC Bike, which took a while but was very kind. We took the train, with our rented bikes, to Weesp, and rode from there to Muiden. I realized pretty quickly we could have biked right out of the city, as it is so easy to bike there. There is absolutely no risk that you will be hit by a car, even riding along the highway.

I loved breathing in the fresh country air, seeing (and smelling) the sheep in the fields. The best part of the ride was on the way home, when we rode along the coast and the North Sea breeze contrasted with the warmth of the day, and our bike trail took us through the countryside with no cars in sight. We ended up biking the entire way home because we missed the turn to the train station. We survived!

At Muiden, we had lunch alongside the canal, as we watched the yachts sail by. This was VERY relaxing. It was, as they say, “the life”. A nice witte bier, yachts going by, a beautiful blue sky, brown bread with fig compote, walnuts and goat cheese!

Muiderslot was the castle we finally arrived at. It was by far the most fun castle I have ever visited. We got a scavenger hunt to do for K, where we had to find things or do thing and put stickers in the right places. It really added to the experience and caused us to explore the entire castle. At the end, he turned in his book and got “knighted”, including a medal to show that he is now a vassal knight of Muiderslot. I’ll let K tell the story below:

“The bike road – we were biking to a castle. We used a bike on the train. And then we took it off and we got out of the train. And we went on the bike ride to a castle and had lunch on the way. At the castle, I got a gold medal and I got one knight, at the gift shop. And one room there was stuff to do, and dress up like stuff, and also in the next room, there was like more things to do, like put your face into armor, and there were horses you could pretend to do a joust, and there was a show that was pretty cool. The castle was pretty amazing because after I got my gold medal, we walked around and we saw hawks, and we saw a sleeping fox, and some owls. It wasn’t like a real castle – it was like the funnest castle for me. It was the funnest castle I’ve been in, and there’s most stuff for kids there.”

That night, we convinced S to go out for fries, and we wanted to take him to one of the traditional fry stands. We ended up having to walk to Rembrandtsplein and I can say, it was full on worth it. The atmosphere of the square, combined with the taste of the fries – it was definitely an Amsterdam experience.

Friday

We spent the morning relaxing & packing and then headed to the Van Gogh museum. It was the first time we had to stand in line for anything. In fact, we stood in line for so long that our IAMSTERDAM cards expired! They still let us in. It was packed in there. I enjoyed learning about Van Gogh. He was interesting in that he wanted to paint peasants, not royalty. He had the money (from his brother) to do what he wanted. He developed a very interesting style later in his life, and was a very technical painter. I also learned he only painted from life, not from memory – and only what was there. So when he was in the asylum, he only painted what he could see from his window. I wonder what mental illness he had – back then they didn’t know.

In K’s words:

“The Van Gogh museum was pretty covered of paintings. You could get at the gift shop just paintings and painting supplies. And like art supplies, but it wasn’t really that much filled of levels. There was a new construction coming out that we saw for a new room, and there were lots of paintings, but the last part there was like really beautiful paintings.”

We had lunch again at the COBRA café on the Museumplein, and took our time, because we knew we were now homeless, having checked out of our AirBNB already.

Afterwards, we went to the VondelPark, walked all through town, including the main shopping street, and ended up having lunch at the Amsterdam museum. As it was an hour before closing, we got to pay half-price and enjoyed our rapid-paced visit. I just wish we had gone there at the beginning of the trip.



In the evening, we left Amsterdam for Iceland. I will miss Amsterdam, as will our whole family. We all find it to be very livable, and a great place to spend time. There is plenty to do for us to come back on a future trip.

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