Wednesday was our first full day in Amsterdam. First thing in the morning I headed out to try to find a bakery to get some food at, but the one right near us was closed so I walked down the road a little until I smelled something yummy and then followed my nose to a french bakery and picked up some yummy morning treats. After that we headed out to the Van Gogh museum at museumplein. When we got there we were pleasantly surprised to see the Iamsterdam sign that you see in the commercials. Other tourists were standing around in the way though making any particularly fantastic photographs untenable.

That’s Jordi, Josie and Celia in front of the letter ‘S’. We had a hot chocolate from a little shop and a snack while outside.

Before heading into the museum though we took advantage of a tip we got from our guidebook. We went to the gift shop and let Josie pick out three postcards with artwork on them. One of the one she picked was this one:

We didn’t want to interrupt her interpretation of art, so we just went with it, but really? Once I got Celia to fall asleep finally on my back, we went inside the museum (with our tickets already purchased) and got Josie a kids audio guide. So between the postcards and looking for the butterflies that signified that the audio guide had some info, Josie was pretty well engaged. We enjoyed looking around the museum and seeing the change in his work and hearing the stories of the troubled man. Celia woke up and that ended our trip around the museum pretty quickly. We headed down to the cafe for lunch and managed to find some tasty treats. I did manage to offend the chef apparently though by asking for plain pasta for the kids, they went and did something entirely different from what was offered rather than just supply some pasta without the tomato sauce! Understanding the view points of different cultures can be tough sometimes.

After lunch and the museum we headed back outside to the plaza and went to the small play area for kids. They had a cool climbing structure that was just a bunch of telephone poles stacked up on top of one another, culminating with a slide from the top down to the ground. Neither one of our kids could really climb up it, instead climbing up the slide and then sliding back down. I thought it was pretty cool, the other kids seemed to manage but it was still a good challenge. They also had a big circular swing that the girls loved.

After playing around for a while and Jordi having another snack we decided to get some genuine french fries on the street and walked ourselves over to Leidseplein, the main square of Amsterdam, following our guidebook along the way. We got some yummy waffles covered in chocolate, belgian style this time. Then further down the street we found a shop that sells pretty much only french fries. We got some, I made them pose for a picture before eating the mayonnaise covered joy and we enjoyed them next to the canals.

And now the problem with writing about our trip more than two months later, I don’t have vivid details anymore. I believe we then caught a tram back to our neighborhood and then got some Indonesian takeout for dinner which was yummy and highly recommended by our upstairs neighbor.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2012 at 9:11 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.