After getting home from London, it was another quiet week of sleep and school. We had to rest up and catch up on work, because we were leaving again that Friday for Amsterdam! We ended up buying a train ticket to Amsterdam, and a bus ticket back, so we could go and come back at convenient times.
It worked out pretty well, because we arrived there in the afternoon of Friday, the 19th, and left in the late afternoon of Monday, June 22nd. We got to Amsterdam and the first thing we noticed was the awesome train station. It looked like it was the oldest piece of architecture in all of Amsterdam.
After getting settled into our hostel, which wasn't actually too bad, we set out to explore the city. Our hotel had I think 16 people to a room, but all of the beds were very comfy and we got a bunch of sheets and a pillow. It turned out that after a night of 16 guys sleeping in a room, it got kind of smelly, but that was my only complaint.
We found a number of delicious places to eat, including the Pancake house and the Bulldog. The city is massive, and even being there for 3 days, we didn't get to explore everything.
One fun thing we did was go to the huge botanical gardens they had. They were pretty cool, not in terms of the number of colorful flowers or plants they had, but because of the number of different types of plants they had and how wide the variety was. I can't remember at all what they were called but they were all pretty cool.
Besides the plants, Amsterdam has an enormous English movie theater that we went to one night, to see the movie, The Hangover. It was amusing, but not a great great movie.
Besides the food, and the garden, the one primary highlight that everyone has to see is the Heineken Brewery. The place was huge, and your trip was a self guided tour that lead you through the Brewery and stopped you at different stages of the beer production. One station, where the beer was fermenting in giant containers, they let your try a taste of unfermented beer, which just tasted really sweet.
It was a pretty cool tour, especially in one station where they had these futuristic looking chairs with tv's and personal speakers inside, where you could select on a screen different years and view the different commercials Heineken's had all throughout their years of existence.
And the best part of the tour by far was the included, EXTRA COLD, drinks they handed out at the end.
Probably in the top 5 of the most refreshing drinks (and by refreshing I really mean cold) I’ve had in Europe so far.
This is a map they gave us at the hostel with a number of "interesting" phrases on the back.
Night view of one of the streets.
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