Cookies, Canals, And Windmills: A Week In Amsterdam With Teenagers

After a slower, cobblestoned week in Bruges, rolling into Amsterdam feels like someone flipped a switch. Suddenly there are bikes everywhere, canals stacked three deep with houseboats, and a kind of buzzy, anything-goes energy that our teens picked up on before we'd even left the train station. We'd built this leg of our trip around one big question: could a city built for canal cruises and art museums also hold the attention of a couple of teenagers who'd rather be doomscrolling? Turns out, yes, easily, and Amsterdam might have quietly become the best stretch of our entire Europe trip. Here's how our week went.



We got into Amsterdam in the early afternoon, dumped our bags at the hotel, and headed straight out because none of us can sit still after a train ride. First stop was the Jordaan neighborhood and De Negen Straatjes, or the Nine Streets, a little grid of canal-side lanes packed with vintage shops, indie streetwear stores, and the kind of secondhand boutiques that make teenagers suddenly very interested in shopping with their parents.



Somewhere in the wandering, someone mentioned Van Stapele, a tiny cookie shop tucked on Heisteeg just off Rokin that's become a full-blown internet sensation. They only make one thing: a warm, crackly dark chocolate cookie with a soft, gooey center, baked fresh in small batches all day long. It's been getting passed around social media for years now and the queue proves it. We went early in the afternoon and still waited a bit, so if you're heading there, morning is your friend, because by late afternoon the line can snake down the street and they do sell out.



For the evening, we wrapped up with dinner at Takumi Tonkotsu Ramen, which sounds like an odd choice for our first night in the Netherlands but turned out to be exactly the kind of rich, slurpable comfort food we needed after a long travel day. The teens' verdict on day one: the cookie and the ramen, in that order.




We kept it simple in the morning with breakfast at Bagel Boy, going with the traditional cream cheese bagel because sometimes there's no point overthinking it. Fueled up, we spent the rest of the morning and a good chunk of the afternoon at the Rijksmuseum, working our way slowly through room after room of Dutch Golden Age paintings.




There happened to be a run of Toy Story 5 promotional booths set up in a few of the galleries while we were there, complete with a photobooth and life-size character cutouts sitting somewhat surreally alongside the 17th century masterpieces, and the teens got a genuine kick out of it, hopping between selfies with the movie displays and selfies in front of actual centuries-old paintings.





The undisputed highlight, promo booths aside, was standing in front of Rembrandt's The Night Watch. It's one of those paintings that's so large and so packed with detail that photos of it online just don't prepare you, you really do feel the scale of it standing in the room. We also lingered a long time at one of the museum's famous 17th century dollhouses, an absurdly detailed miniature house filled with tiny painted rooms and tiny furniture down to the last teacup, which somehow held the teens' attention longer than half the paintings did.






We made a conscious choice not to bike through central Amsterdam with the kids. It's a city built for locals on bikes who know exactly what they're doing, and dodging trams and cargo bikes with a teenager who's never ridden in real traffic sounded like a recipe for a bad afternoon. Instead we just took the bus, the route takes you by ferry out of the city and then along quiet paths through nature reserves and polder landscape, past an old chalk mill, before arriving at Zaanse Schans itself, a preserved village of working windmills, wooden houses, and craft workshops.






Once there, we wandered past the iconic windmills, ducked into a clog-maker's workshop to watch shoes being carved by hand, and stopped at a cheese farm for samples that made the whole group reconsider their grocery store cheese choices forever.




We got back into the city with just enough energy left for an early night to pack, though if your legs have more left in them, an interactive escape room like Sherlocked is apparently one of the top-rated evening activities for families right now, and we heard great things from other travelers we bumped into along the way.


In the morning we headed to De Pijp, one of the more lived-in, less touristy neighborhoods, to wander the Albert Cuyp Market. It's the largest and oldest street market in the country, stretching for blocks with hundreds of stalls selling everything from cheese and fabric to phone chargers and souvenirs.




Amsterdam's city center is full of stroopwafel stands charging tourist prices for a mediocre waffle, so we skipped those entirely and made a beeline for Rudi's Original Stroopwafels at the market instead, where the syrup is still warm and gooey off the iron and the line moves fast. It's the kind of thing where you understand the hype about thirty seconds after your first bite.




We went to Foodhallen Food Court for dinner that night, and we went straight for the poke bowl stall instead of grazing across five different cuisines. It hit the spot after a day of walking, fresh, cold, and a nice change of pace from the fries and pastries we'd been living on. It was a relaxed, no-fuss way to close out our last full day, the kind of meal where nobody has to agree on anything because everyone just orders what they want.



We have to highlight several viral food spots that we tried, the pancake at Pat's Poffertjes on Oude Leliestraat, a tiny spot that's gone properly viral for its mini poffertjes, plated up hot and buttery with a heavy dusting of powdered sugar, plus we grabbed a slice of Sophie's fruit cake to eat on the walk since none of us could resist.



Seven days earlier we'd rolled in not entirely sure how a canal-and-museum city would land with a couple of teenagers, and we left with a phone full of photos, a genuine favorite cookie shop, and two kids already asking when we're coming back. Berlin was waiting, but a piece of us was already planning a return trip to Amsterdam.