Vacation stop #4: Eindhoven

I must admit: Eindhoven didn't bring any image or thought to my mind when Jan suggested it as a vacation stop. He had been there often for work, even just the week before on an event but it was totally unknown to me.  I knew Sofinesse had been there on a weekend but her shopping didn't make me excited to go.   I googled a bit, found some museums like the Van Abbe museum that seemed nice to visit but I couldn't figure out online how toddler friendly they are. All museums claim to be child friendly online and they all have child activities, but usually those are suitable for 7-10 year olds.

But we had once again found a nice hotel with pool and in worst case we'd coccoon together in our room which had been quite pleasant so far.  

We decided to check out the Philips museum: after all Eindhoven = Philips and Philips = Eindhoven. (Hey, I just discovered that PSV = Philips Sport Vereniging. How many of my readers knew that?). The museum was a fun trip into the past: so many devices that we know from growing up or from our grandparents homes. Most of them had become completely obsolete.  Old tv sets, radio's, shavers, juicers, cassette tape recorders, mixers, walk men's, ... Their designs that were so recognisable and have shaped our rooms.  We had a lot of explaining to do to Kabouter and he couldn't grasp it all. In a way it seemed a bit sad: the list of innovations per decade were so impressive and Philips seemed to have had a huge impact on our lives with all of our consumer goods. But the consumer goods display stopped with the Senseo machine in 2001 and one sort of daylight lamp out of 2010 that I had never seen before.  2 items in 16 years.  Clearly they are not playing a leading innovative role in our consumer lives anymore.

But that's not their strategy anymore either: they've sold their tv and several other consumer divisions and last parts of the expositions was about sensors, big data, medical equipment etc.   Their focus simply isn't so visible anymore to us. They had a very cute child MRI scanner that Kabouter and Beertje loved and played with for a long time.  This scanner is part of a program that is used in hospitals to put their little patients at ease (and have better scans as result).   The kid's MRI allows you to scan (your) toys and the results are shown in little fun movies. This way the children get to know the machine in a fun way and are relax when they go in it themselves. 

Afterwards we walked through the city but I didn't click with Eindhoven.  Similarly to Rotterdam which also got bombed in the 2nd world war (Eindhoven = Philips remember and Philips was war critical) there is no historic city center anymore.   There's some modern fun buildings but the majority of the office and residential buildings were boring.  I miss character in new cities. For the same reason I have difficulty to love the (modern parts of) north-American cities.  I simply need history to enjoy a city.  And I couldn't care less for the shops. Any city has shops.  I didn't need to buy stuff.

Fortunately we found a tiny Christmas market on our way back where Kabouter fished himself a Thomas the train set.  Score! So we hurried back to our room to play...to go swimming and to play on the bed.