Day 24

Today we woke up early and I wandered downstairs to try and find some coffee or espresso.  Walked right into the middle of the greatest array of food I have seen since I was back in America.  The hotel had an available breakfast buffet with homemade waffles, many pastries, real eggs, sausage, cereal, toast, 4 different types of juices and yogurt with fruit.  Wow.  I may sound like my Grandpa, who when asked about how the cruise he went on was would respond with how good he thought the food is.  But this was amazing.  Only downside was it was 17 Euro($25).  I had to do it.  I wouldn't forget the price tag though, look for justification tomorrow.

So far great start to the day.  Needed a sweatshirt and jeans for the first few hours of the day but turned out to beautiful.  First things first, we headed into town and figured out what we were going to do for the day.  Well, the Heineken brewery tour seems to be quite popular, shall we head that way?

This is the place where the original factory was built in 1873.  It has since been torn down and rebuilt around the early 1900's.  Now the factory has been moved out to the countryside and the old factory is being used for tours.


Note:This is a picture from the day before, that's why its cloudy.

One of the old delivery trucks for Heineken.  A little bit less advanced then today's delivery methods.

 Evolution of the Heineken bottle over a hundred years.

Pretty cool, they give you some at the end and have quite the little setup in the serving room.  Wherever you moved your glass, the Heineken coaster would automatically move under it.

Went to the Anne Frank house but unfortunately it is very commercialized and there were several hundred people outside waiting to get in.  If they were able to hide a small girl and her family in an area, I really doubt they can shuffle several hundred people in and out in a timely manner.

So instead, we decided it might be cool to check out the Van Gogh Museum.  A little bit of a line when we went, but we expected anything to have quite the line.

Like seemingly every museum, we were not allowed to take pictures except on the ground level.  A few things I didn't know about Van Gogh.  Van Gogh was a sculptor/painter in the late 1800's.  He did not like city life and painted mostly things in nature and on farms--which was surprising.

Also Van Gogh was not popular or rich at all while he was alive.  He was a mooch of his brother's family actually, and none of his work got popular until after his death.  Van Gogh felt like his creativity was not the same as it used to be, and selfishly killed himself in  1890.

Eventually the Van Gogh museum started to close on us and we continued walking around the city.  The great thing was that we were staying at 4-star hotels, the bad thing was that we were hardly in the room.  Every moment other than sleeping we were out walking around the beautiful city.  I really had a mis-perception on Amsterdam.  I thought it would be a large, dirty, unorganized city with a few historic sites.  Could not have been more wrong.  It is a small, beautiful, incredibly efficient and extremely clean modern city that is more production-oriented than historic.  It is so clean that I actually felt bad when I dropped a piece of muffin, and stopped and picked it up.  There is zero trash on the streets.

It seems that although Heineken is a very popular beer because it is produced in Amsterdam, everyone seems to forgot the little brother that is also produced there.  Amstel Light.  Amstel light used to be my favorite beer for many years(of course I must say legally just a few months since I turned 21 in March). Anyways, it was actually hard to find Amstel, despite being produced in the city.





Pretty active day.  Managed to go to a few historical sites as well as a brewery tour.  Absolutely love the public transportation, it made negotiating the small city so much easier than walking and cheaper than taking a taxi.  Just upset it closes so early at 12:30.  Sounds late, but when you have sunlight until 11:15, it certainly doesn't feel late.  Well day 3 of Amsterdam, and still loving every minute of it.  Last full day here already.  So disappointing, I don't want to go back to Rome.  At least not yet.  Thank you all for reading!  Stay tuned for final day in Amsterdam!