Family vacation to Amsterdam

Amsterdam, you may recall from your years as an undergraduate "studying" abroad in Europe, is a city famous for hookers in windows and coffee shops that sell marijuana but rarely coffee. Amsterdam, you may also recall from your European history classes, was at one time the richest city in the world. In Amsterdam, merchants relied on financial innovations like insurance and the world's first stock exchange to finance sea adventures to Asia and the Americas for spices, porcelain, silver, beaver pelts, gold, et cetera.

Remembering the Golden Age of Amsterdam, viewing Rembrandt's Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum, as the afternoon grew longer and Bobby increasingly longed for a nap.

Another family photo with a tired baby. Random canal in the background. The canal may be Prinsengracht.

Another way to view Amsterdam is as a modern European metropolis with a high standard of living. Loving the modern Amsterdam lifestyle, my sister and her husband make at least one extended sojourn in Amsterdam a year. Christine, Bobby, and I spent a long weekend with them in Amsterdam's De Pijp (pronounced "da-pipe," I believe) in search of this high quality of life.

High quality of life for the Linges means good food, which we had in abundance in Amsterdam.

Digression on urban living and visiting (to skip, as you like)

It's not uncommon that Americans make tours of European capitals. These tours make Europe into a museum. You see old civic buildings where often civic functions are no longer performed. You see monuments to the great wars that were fought for centuries until 1945 (with the exception of the Balkans and Ukraine, where wars are more recent). You go to so many old churches, today void of actual parishioners. I believe such trips are important to Americans because we get to witness the foundations of Western Civilization, which we learn about as school kids.

In such a tour of the major sites – valid though I believe such tours are – it is harder to experience the trends in urban life which actually develop reflexively across the Western world, including Europe and North America. For example, in both places, suburbanization grew after World War II, de-industrialization now continues apace, and today there is an urban renaissance -- in Europe as in the US. Knowledge industry workers are clustering in cities that offer services to consume. There are museums, restaurants, cocktail bars, and things to do nearby in a lively street scene. Food ingredients are local where possible but of increasingly high quality. There are craft breweries nestled in with the local traditions of beer brewing.

Narrating our adventure

On a Thursday morning, Christine, Bobby, and I boarded the Eurostar with plans of meeting Rachel and Kevin in Amsterdam and staying through Sunday in De Pijp. Bobby likes looking out the windows of moving vehicles because so much new comes into his field of vision, and this suits his short attention span. Unfortunately, this short attention span also means he loses interest in looking out the window, rapid though the scenes flash before him, so we have to spend a considerable amount of time on the train looking for new things to occupy him. Every once in a while, it helps to get up from my seat and walk around with the lad so he can look at new places on the train itself.

Bobby's excitement builds as the Eurostar pulls out of London's St. Pancras International.

July weather in Amsterdam was lovely.

Bobby once again showing his appreciation for wheeled vehicles while at a sidewalk cafe in De Pijp.

Amsterdam's De Pijp neighborhood is just outside of the famous canal belt, which itself is just outside the old city center. You may not think of it as "touristy" because there are not a lot of tourist sites there with the exception of the "Heineken Experience." Nearby, however, are the Rijksmuseum and Vondelpark.




With regards to the Heineken Experience, I was hoping more for a brewery tour that walked us through the history of one of the world's largest brewers that has not been swallowed by the industry's obnoxious behemoth, AB InBev. Instead I got some ham-handed effort at making beer "fun" – did we need that? Alas, the historical part of the tour mostly consisted of some old Heineken bottles and a walk through a preserved room of the old brewery containing copper vats formerly used for brewing. There wasn't much historical context otherwise provided, and weirdly, they gave us some beers and then invited us to sit in a room surrounded by video screens showing people drinking Heineken and enjoying the parties they were at. We also went on an immersive multimedia experience of what it was like to be brewed as beer... It was a bit strange and not very informative.

Extended family on the Heineken Experience. Bobby just couldn't wait for the beer drinking part of the tour, which comes at the end, so he was having some milk in preparation for his nap in his Ergo Baby.

Something interesting about Europe is the appreciation of design in daily life. We see this reflected in the US, where Ikea, the world's largest furniture maker, sells us Swedish designs at cheap prices, where Crate and Barrel was founded in order to sell us Danish-designed homewares (and not so cheaply), or the fashion marques of Zara, H&M, and the brands owned by LVMH (Louis Vuitton, Dior, Pucci, Bulgari). In this world where everything can be bought on Amazon – well, actually you're wrong: there is a hell of a lot you cannot find on Amazon but often we don't bother to look. Thus, in Europe, even a man like me, who doesn't particularly like shopping, can find neat items that one would be less likely to stumble across on Amazon. So we bought Bobby a wooden tractor (he loves toys on wheels) and some sweet designer sunglasses.

Baby needs his eyes protected from the sun, and he can get it while looking cool like Daddy at the same time (store visited: MaisonNL).

Each of the two families visiting Amsterdam rented their own narrow houses through Airbnb. Europeans like to retain the old buildings of their city centers while renovating the insides. In fact, retaining old buildings, giving European cities that museum quality, is an important part of being "European." So we stayed in modern apartments inside very old buildings.

De Pijp street view. You can see the narrowness that defines Dutch housing stock.

We ate at several De Pijp restaurants and sampled the varied offerings of the Dutch craft brewers. We made a family picnic in Vondelpark, where we had European wine, cheese, bread, and cured meats. And we visited Foodhallen, which may be described as an Amsterdam hawker center, a food court, Amsterdam's Borough Market equivalent, or even the Amsterdam version of Cedar Rapids' own NewBo Market. Basically, there are dozens of small food stalls set up inside of an old tram depot (so it is a huge room), with seating scattered throughout, and your mission is to sample a wide variety of international food and drink. And sample we did.

Picnic in Vondelpark. With the weather so lovely, the park was a bit crowded.

At Foodhallen, baby Bobby reaches for Gugu's Savignon Blanc.

Bobby and Dad in the Rijksmuseum Research Library, which I understand to be a library devoted to the Rijksmuseum's art collection.

Although Airbnb invites you to "stay like a local," if you're not actually a local resident then at some point your vacation must end. On Sunday afternoon we boarded our train back to London and spent four more hours trying to keep Bobby entertained. For me, back to London means back to work on Monday morning.

Reflecting on our long weekend in Amsterdam, I recommend sojourning there because the quality of life is high, and the prices, relatively speaking, are low.

Bobby and Dad pulling out of Amsterdam Centraal and bound for London's St. Pancras International.