I have to be honest, I chose the destination for our family vacation. Partly, because it was one of the cheaper places for us to visit, but partly because I had seen other bloggers visit with their families and it looked beautiful. Of course, I knew about the red light district and the marijuana smoking, but I thought it was mostly contained to one part of the city. I was mainly right…it just turns out that that one area was right by our hotel. Ooops! Hannes questioned my decision to go there for weeks before we left. He later changed his mind and was very happy we went. It is one of the oldest and most beautiful cities I have ever seen. The majority of the city is from the 1600 and 1700's. There are so many old buildings, tightly packed together. And I didn't even mention the canals or the bridges. We did take a boat tour and they told us the numbers, but of course I forgot. Let's just say there are thousands of bridges and lots of canals. There are three main ones that intersect the city and then several smaller ones that branch out from those.
In this picture you can see a houseboat. The city has 2,500 houseboats in their canals. Some of them seem super nice, but a lot look they're falling apart. On one of our tours they told us that it is pretty expensive to live in a houseboat. The docking space alone costs 150,000 Euros.
It's hard to tell from these pictures, but so many of the buildings were nearly falling over. I really think that if they weren't built so closely together they would topple over. We learned on the boat tour that when these houses were built you had to pay taxes based on the width of the building so people made their houses skinny to pay less taxes.
The corner of this building is skinnier than Tyler…and that's hard to do!
We stayed in a hotel directly across the street from the Central Station. It really was a perfect location. Not more than a 15 minute walk to pretty much anywhere in the city. *Side note about our hotel. It was the weirdest hotel I have ever seen/stayed at! It is called the A-Train hotel and the owner is OBSESSED with trains! The entire hotel is decorated with train things. The area where they serve breakfast has train seat booths and there are pictures of trains everywhere. I really wish I would have taken some pictures, but I did not. I'm sure if you google it you can see it in all of its glory. It wasn't a bad place to stay though. Like I said, it was a great location, breakfast was included. The rooms were a little small, but Henry was a trooper with pretty much not getting to crawl for the entire week. They didn't have a lobby area at the hotel and the breakfast area didn't have the cleanest floors - not when Henry will eat any crumb he can find anywhere. Our room was super small. The only place he could move around was on the bed in between Hannes and I. And during the day he spent most of his time in his stroller.
We went to the Anne Frank house the first full day we were there. It was an amazing experience. You weren't allowed to photograph anything so we don't have any pictures of that. Afterwards, we ate lunch at the Pancake Bakery. That is definitely a must visit place to eat if you ever go to Amsterdam! Hannes, Tyler and I shared the bacon and apple pancake (my pick and my favorite), the banana nutella pancake and the ham, cheese and mushroom pancake. We figured we needed one savory pancake, it was lunch after all. We also really enjoyed some street fries. That is one of the main food trends in Amsterdam. There are lots of places that sell cones of fries, usually topped with mayonnaise. It is delicious! I don't know what it is that's different, but the fries are delicious!
We also went to NEMO Science Museum while we were there. The kids loved it! It's like a much larger version of the Saint Louis Science Center. They had a lot of different exhibits. Some about DNA, the teenage body, space, atoms, electricity, computers and you could also do experiments. Henry really loved it too!
The view of NEMO from our boat tour. It looks like a giant ship and when you walk there you have to go across that bridge on the right to get there.
These pictures were taken right outside of NEMO.
Another thing that Amsterdam is known for is it's outdoor flea markets. We had planned on visiting two, but only made it to Waterlooplein. It definitely gave me the creeps. I hate used clothing and thrift shops and flea markets. Something about putting on clothes that other people have been wearing for years freaks me out! Hannes found this jean jacket and then proceeded to wear it every day for the rest of our trip. Emily also got a sweatshirt, but I think hers was new.
Here are some pictures from our boat tour around the city. Emily decided she didn't like boats and didn't want to come with us.
I love this picture. It totally looks like Henry is pointing at something for Tyler to look at!
We've also made it a tradition to go to breweries in every city we visit…if they have one. So far, we have been to the Sam Adams Brewery in Boston, the Carlsberg Brewery in Denmark and, of course, the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in St. Louis. We figured while we were in Amsterdam we should visit the Heineken Brewery. I think it was the best brewery experience yet…Hannes thinks that the AB Brewery is better. I guess it depends what you're looking for. I definitely think the Heineken Brewery had more things to do, especially for kids. They had an interactive bottling ride, a DJ station, a room where you could watch Heineken commercials, a Champions League room complete with playstations. There was just so much to do!
We also visited the museum square. We were going to go to the Van Gogh Museum, but it seemed like a lot of money and there were tons of kids in line so we decided not to. We did visit the iamsterdam sign, but it was hard to get a good picture of it!
The kids were great on the trip! Tyler only did a little complaining about the walking, but when I travel I try to make the most of my time there. We were doing stuff all day every day. We were so exhausted at night that we were all asleep by 9:30 every night and we started our day at 8 every morning. I really cannot believe how great Henry was with being constricted so much. He went from bed to a highchair to a stroller to a highchair and then back to bed. He even did great on the flights!
He got a little fussy at the airport and wanted to crawl around so Hannes took him on a rolling tour. He seemed to enjoy it!
I feel like I can't complete this post without telling one story about when we first arrived. Of course, we had no idea where we were when we first got there. We took the train from the airport to Central Station and then walked to our hotel where we checked-in to our rooms. It was only about 3 in the afternoon at that point and we decided to just walk around and explore. We walked out of the hotel and it seemed that there were a lot of people to the right so we decided to walk that way. Almost immediately, Tyler asked what that smell was. It was, of course, marijuana. So, we told them that. Emily seemed to be getting a little upset - anyone who knows her knows that she does not do well with things like that! We just kind of laughed it off and kept walking. Tyler was hungry so we got a couple of cheeseburgers at McDonald's and then continued on. We just kind of kept following the crowd. It seemed like the more we walked the more we could smell marijuana. It was everywhere! At one point, Emily broke down and was crying. The only way we could get her to calm down was to buy her some Starbucks. We walked down to a really nice square and then turned to head back to the hotel. We didn't know quite where we were so we walked down this one street. People were kind of looking at us funny, but we had no clue why. Then after walking another block we found out why. We stumbled across the red light district. Tyler enjoyed seeing a couple of girls in lingerie dancing in windows. We quickly crossed the street and took a different route back. After that we avoided the right side of the hotel and had no other problems. We did continue to smell the occasional waft of marijuana…I think it's inevitable. We just chalked it up to the culture of the city and moved on. The kids didn't seem to care much either. We think it came from the smoke-coffee shops around the city. When the door opens a little of the air leaks out into the street and you can smell it for a second. We really only smelled it when we were around our hotel. It seems that there is a larger concentration of those coffee shops there. It was pretty easy to avoid those areas.
