Wait, you can't be a police officer...

Dam Square

Amsterdam was a very last minute thing. I had been thinking about it a while, but whilst in Brussels, I decided I wasn't quite ready to go home on the 11th, so I booked a hostel for 2 nights in Amsterdam, choosing it only because it was called The Flying Pig and it was in the middle of everything. (It was a very good decision.) 

I got there around 6PM on the 11th, just as the sun was setting. I had taken a very mediocre screenshot of the directions to my hostel from the train station, but despite that, I didn't get lost. I arrived to an absolutely hopping bar as the lobby. There was music and quite a few people for it being 6PM on a Tuesday. I checked in, put my stuff in my room, met a Swedish guy, and then went downstairs to do what I usually do–hang out, look at my map, and try and make friends. In relatively short-order I was approached by a tall Englishman named Daniel. "You look lost," he said. I told him I was just trying to figure out what to do tomorrow, and he gave me a few ideas and then told me that I should accompany him and the large group of people next to me on a pub crawl in an hour. That was how I ended up on a pub crawl within 2 hours of arriving in Amsterdam. The pub crawl itself was pretty OK. I met some nice people from all over (Daniel as it turns out is a police officer–I still don't really believe him), but over all it wasn't anything to write home about. I ended up leaving early to go back to the hostel, but it was alright.

Once I got back, I had a beer with a few of the guys who had also come back early, and then went up to my room to go to bed. Before I went to bed, I struck up a conversation with an Israeli guy who just finished his three years in the IDF and did the typical Israeli thing: go travel and party afterwards. And strangely enough, it turns out his parents are both from Wisconsin. Weird, right? We shut the lights off around 3AM. 

All six of us in our room woke up around 9:30 and went downstairs to have free hostel breakfast. Then the Israeli guy–whose name I don't know how to spell and I feel bad–surprised me by saying "when do you want to go to the Van Gogh Museum?" I had told him that I wanted to go the night before, and he had said that he'd be interested in coming with. But didn't actually expect him to follow up on that.

So him and I set off on our adventure through Amsterdam. It started with us getting a little lost and doing maybe an hour and a half worth of wandering (and nearly getting hit by bikes) before actually making it to the Van Gogh Museum, but that was fine. It was a beautiful day, and he was super easy to talk to. 

The Van Gogh Museum is rather small. Like get through in less than an hour small, but still really cool. And I prefer Van Gogh to stuff that you might see in, say, Italy. Renaissance art doesn't really do much for me. So that was neat. But by the time we got out, it was only 1PM. So we decided to go to the Heineken Museum. 

The Heineken Museum is definitely the best thing to do in Amsterdam is you are anywhere under the age of 30 and probably if you are over that too. The whole experience is kind of similar to the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, but it seems the Heineken people wanted to one-up the Irish, so they put quite a bit more stuff in it. The do the whole, this-is-how-we-make-Heineken thing, but then they "turn you into a bottle of Heineken" which was really cool. (It's a little ride thing.) They then show you all sorts of other cool Heineken in popular culture stuff, and then send you to the bar where a bartender explains to you the importance of foam and quizzes you on various things. ("What color is Heineken?" "No! Not yellow! We don't want to be confused with Budweiser!") He also asked how they say 'cheers' in the Netherlands. No one said anything, so one the off chance that the German was right, I said 'prost' quietly. And, guess what, I got it right. "That's right, expect we don't sound as angry." (I guess now is as good of time as any to tell you how many times I laughed reading the Dutch in the streets. It looks a lot like German, if you were a country bumpkin or something. Quite funny.) We spent quite a bit of times with the ads and stuff after that, and then eventually made our way out. 


By that point, we still hadn't had lunch, so we got some schwarma and went to the Torture Museum for the hell of it. That was kind of a trip. The actors were super into and spoke in a mixture of Dutch and English, and there were lights everywhere and that was just nuts.

With that, both of us were tuckered out, so we went back to the hostel to take a nap. I got back up around 7:30PM and hung out in the lobby for a while. A few people that I had met on the pub crawl were down there, so we ended up hanging out for a while and wandering around Amsterdam. Afterwards, we grabbed some dinner to-go and brought it back to the hostel, where we chilled until midnight or so. I was so tried from the night before and the prospect of  a half day's worth of trains the next day that I decided to hit the hay early. 

I left Amsterdam around 10:30 the next morning, headed for Tübingen. Surprisingly there were no hitches and no missed trains. A Deutsche Bahn miracle! And now onto the next adventure: Ireland for Paddy's Day. Going to be a wild, wild time. But more on that later. Until then, bis später, dudes.