Amsterdam wasn’t on my bucket list of must see cities to visit.  I had researched it a couple of times when I was trying to decide where to go in Europe and it never jumped out at me as somewhere I had to see.  But when my wife had to go to The Netherlands for work, I figured it would be a good opportunity to check out the bicycle-crazy European city.

Upon my arrival to Amsterdam I found that the public transportation was very easy to follow.  Knowing that we would be in Amsterdam for 3 days we purchased a visitor transportation ticket that cost 37 Euros for unlimited rides throughout those 3 days. Between the tram (or light rail as we call it in the US) and the metro line we were able to easily get from point A to point B with a little bit of walking in between.

Walking was a little treacherous at times. When I first stepped onto the streets of Amsterdam from the metro station, fresh off my 8 hour flight from Minneapolis, my luggage rolling behind me, I found out just how aggressive the bikers were.  As I tried to gain my bearings to figure out which direction to walk towards my hotel, I came close to being taken out by the fast cruising bikers. Apparently they have the right of way at all times, even in the crosswalks across the bike lane.  Eventually I was able to find my way to a wider pedestrian side walk where I could comfortably roll my suitcase to my hotel.  While there was a little bit of a learning curve in determining how the street intersections functioned, once I knew to look out for bikes in addition to the cars I didn’t have any more close calls.

One of the first things we did in Amsterdam was to get out on the canals the city is so famous for.  There are numerous canal tours within Amsterdam and I think we got lucky with the one we picked from a company called Boat Amsterdam.  We chose them partly because they had good reviews and had a tour that included unlimited drinks in their price and partly because they were close to our hotel.  The sky was fairly overcast the day we went and it had just rained so that may have contributed to the lack of others going on the tour but we ended up being the only ones on our tour so we got the full attention of the tour guide.  We were also able to take advantage of the unlimited drinks.  We passed by several other boat tours that were packed full of tourists.  It was a bit odd that ours was so empty but we weren’t complaining.  The tour ended up being a great way to see the city and we got to learn a little about the history of Amsterdam.

After the canal tour we had a few hours before our pre-booked tour of the Anne Frank house.  We decided to explore the city a little on foot and stop at a bakery called Winkle 43.  I had read about Winkle 43 and their famous apple pies so I was pretty excited.  A Dutch bakery with apple pie… It had to be good.  Unfortunately we were pretty disappointed.  The bakery stood on a corner with small tables filled with people along the outside and a plaza across the street with additional people enjoying their dishes from Winkle 43.  There was a small staircase from the outside to get into the main part of the small café.  Once we walked up things were fairly disorganized with people standing at the top of the stairs, not sure what to do and servers quickly moving all over the place.

We eventually figured out that we could sit wherever we wanted to (inside or out) and found a small table for two.  A few minutes later a server did come to take our order and we each asked for a piece of apple pie.  Our table was across the aisle from a countertop from which behind the servers gathered drinks and plates. The pies came up from a food elevator just behind the counter.  There was a constant flow of pies coming up from this elevator that were cut and then handed out.  Eventually a couple of the cut pieces came to our table and we dug in.

The crust of the pie was not the normal apple pie crust we are used to in the US.  It was not flakey like a usual pie crust.  Instead the entire crust was more like a cake.  Then there were apples in the middle along with something I had never seen in an apple pie before, raisins.  This didn’t completely ruin the dish but it wasn’t fun to have to pick through it to take out the raisins.  Overall the dessert wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great and wasn’t really what I would call an apple pie.  Neither my wife nor I were impressed.   

Not that we had planned to go from one depressing thing to another but we had tickets at a specific time to see the Anne Frank house shortly after our visit to Winkle 43.  We arrived about 15 minutes before our ticket time to find a line of 20-30 people outside of the entrance.  We started to get in line when an employee of the Anne Frank house asked us if we had tickets and what time they were for.  When we told her our ticket time was in about 15 minutes we were told we had to wait until our ticket time to get in line.  So we found some chairs nearby and waited until our pre-planned time to get in line.

After getting in line it was probably close to half an hour before we actually started the tour and got into the house because of how slow the line moved.  The tour itself was good and was self-guided with a hand held audio guide.  I had read the book The Diary of Anne Frank a few times throughout my time in school but it had been at least 20 years since.  So it was good that the tour gave some background information on the book and its contents so I could remember the story.  The tour went through all of the rooms in the annex that the Frank family lived in.  It was bigger than I would have thought and it was on multiple levels on the upper part of the building.  The stairway leading up to it was hidden behind a bookshelf that was still there.   The annex was not furnished but there were plenty of photos and explanations in each room to paint a picture of what life was like. The whole experience was a powerful reminder of what happened in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s.

The evening ended with us visiting a beer hall that had a few dozen beers on tap and well over 100 types of beers in bottles.  The place was pretty small and dark with the music turned up.   It was filled with young people enjoying a late night ale.  We found a couple of spots with barstools overlooking the street.  The beer choices were plastered all over the walls with the name, type and IBUs.  It was a bit overwhelming but after some time we were able to make our choices and enjoy them before heading back to the hotel for the night.

The next day began with us going to a restaurant called Wicked Waffles.  We took the tram from the stop near our hotel to just down the street from the breakfast destination.  It was located a different part of town from where we had been the day before in a very quiet neighborhood.  It was a small café with about 8-10 tables, many of which were occupied.  The menu was pretty much limited to waffles but had just about any topping you could want from peanut butter to cheese to fruit.  One of the few other things they did have was something called egg frites which were a bacon wrapped fried egg.  These were delicious.  The waffles were good as well, but took far too long as we waited about 20 minutes after we ordered to get our food.

We spent the rest of the morning into the afternoon just outside of Amsterdam at a place called Zaanse Chans which was an experience all on its own.  When we got back to the city in the late afternoon we spent some time walking through the city streets. They were crowded with people all over the place enjoying a nice Saturday afternoon.  We could always tell when we were passing by a coffee shop by the strong aromas coming from them, and we passed by quite a few. After the exploring for a bit we had built up an appetite and decided to try a barbeque place that specialized in ribs.

The restaurant called itself a café but it had the look and feel of a small American bar.  Our seating was even at a countertop along the wall like you would find in a bar.  They only had a couple of beer options, Amstel or Heineken but had several options for food from the grill.  I ordered the smoked ribs and my wife got the spare ribs.  Smoked ribs must not be a common thing in Amsterdam since the waiter asked me if I had had smoked ribs before and understood what I was getting.  I’m glad I did because when the ribs came out I was able to dig in once I disposed of the ugly raw onion that came on top, and they were excellent.  There wasn’t any barbeque sauce but there was something similar to Chick Fil-A sauce that worked really well on top of the ribs.

After dinner we decided to find a place to get a view from up top of the city.  There were a few options that we could choose from in Amsterdam.  The place we ended up at was called the W that was nearby where we had just eaten dinner.  It was a bar at the top of a building in the middle of the city with both an indoor and outdoor area to sit and enjoy a drink.  It was still early in the evening so the night crowd had not gotten there yet and we had our pick of places to sit, especially outside.  The bar was not located on the tallest building in Amsterdam and didn’t have a 360 degree view but we could still see quite a bit.  We sat there until the evening sky turned dark and saw the city skyline light up.  It was a great way to spend our last evening in Amsterdam.

Our final day in The Netherlands did not have an agenda other than our tickets to the Heineken Experience in the mid afternoon before we caught our flight in the evening. We started off by going to MOOK Pancakes, a local pancake shop where I ordered a stack of pancakes covered in chocolate, peanut butter, bananas and strawberries.  It was quite filling but a good meal to get me going for the day.

Having a free morning led us to go to a part of town that we had not visited yet, the museum district.  Amsterdam is a city filled with museums, over 60 in total and has the highest density of museums in the world.  We went to none of them.  In general the museums didn’t seem that interesting as much of it was focused around art.  Instead we spent some time walking around a nice large park that was situated near the museum quarter.  The park was densely forested in some areas and of course had some small canals throughout.  There were people with their dogs off leash walking around.  There were playgrounds for kids, tennis courts and fountains.  We also walked by a couple of fitness classes and some unique statues that popped up throughout the park.

The end of the park came out right near a bunch of Amsterdam’s largest museums including the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum.  The famous “I Amsterdam” was supposedly behind the Rijksmuseum, but we never found it.  We did find a few of the museum shops that we could go into without getting tickets into the actual museums.  The shops were packed with other tourists and expensive souvenirs so we didn’t spend much time in any of them.  But it did give us a taste of what was at some of the museums.

Nearby the museum quarter is normally a large market.  We walked towards where we thought the market was supposed to be but never found any stands set up for a market.  There was just an empty street with many shops that were closed.  We came to realize that since it was Sunday, unfortunately the market was not opened.  Instead we found a small café to sit at outside for a little while until our ticketed time at the Heineken Experience.

When we got to the Heineken Experience it didn’t seem like our ticketed time really mattered.  They never checked or asked us what our time was.  They just scanned our tickets and let us in.  A much different experience that the Anne Frank House.  After our tickets were scanned we were given a wristband with two little chips on it that were for our two beers at the end of the tour.  The tour started with us gathering in a group of other tourists and an employee explaining a bit about how the tour worked before setting us on our way through the entrance.  There was no audio guide, which was actually kind of nice, and things were mostly self-guided.

The building that the Heineken Experience is in was the original brewery that is no longer in use.  Heineken got too large to brew their beer in the city so they moved their brewing operations to just outside of Amsterdam.  The Heineken Experience allowed us to go through different parts of the original brewery.  It started off with a history of the company and the beer.  There were videos along the walls and workers in the different rooms to explain what the different areas were once used for.  We then went through the brewing process which allowed us to go through the mashing and boiling rooms.  There was still a strong smell of the brewing grains even though there hadn’t been beer actively brewed there in 30 years.

This was all common to any other brewery tour I had been through and wasn’t all that exciting.  But it was only the first half of the experience, and that is where things took a different turn.  We were led up some stairs to a new room in which there were people waiting in a new line and we weren’t really sure why.   After a few minutes some doors opened and we piled into a dark room.  The doors behind us closed and the entire room lit up, including the floor, with a video about pouring the perfect beer. As soon as that was over we went into another small room that had benches and video screens on either side, think this may have been an elevator. Another video played in this room.  Finally we went out of the room with benches and were led to stand in an even larger room.  This room also had video screens all around us.  This video took us through the bottling process and included movement and shaking as the bottle moved through the conveyor belts and was filled up.

Out of this room is where moved on and got our first tasting beers.  The tour guides in this room talked for a minute and explained how instead of “Cheers” they say “Prost” and everyone in the room then raised their glasses for a toast.  This was only the beginning of the interactive experiences that were in the old Heineken brewery.  We next found several rooms that had everything from foosball, a dance party room with flashing lights, video games, photo opportunities, and many other things I couldn’t remember.  Some of these things were likely geared towards people that were consuming things other than beer while in Amsterdam.

We were able to make our own custom labeled Heineken bottle, we tried our hand at pouring the perfect beer, we even rode a stationary bike with karaoke that was in Dutch.  There was almost no end to the amount of activities here.  Only after we zigzagged our way through the numerous activity rooms did we finally get to the bar were we got our two beers.  I was a little disappointed that there were no other options other than just Heineken.  I know that they don’t make too many other beers but it would have been nice to be able to try something else. 

Once we finished our beers we decided to move on.  We picked up our customized beer bottle from the gift shop and perused a little bit.  There wasn’t anything unique in the gift shop that we could not have found online so we didn’t grab any other items.  In all we had spent a little over 2 hours at the Heineken Experience, but had we really wanted to do all of the activities probably could have spent more.

When we left it was late afternoon but we still had some time to make a couple of last stops before we headed to the airport. There were a couple more food items we wanted to try, stroopwaffles and frites. We found a stroopwaffle place nearby , however this proved to be a bit of a painful experience. When we go there, there was people standing all around in the small shop. It took a minute to determine where the line started. The line itself moved pretty quick. After I ordered I learned why people were standing all around the shop. It took forever to get the orders out. While I was waiting my wife was able to go and find frites, the Amsterdam version of fries that are a bit like steak fries, and she got back and we had time to eat that before my stroopwaffle was ready.

When I did finally get my stroopwaffle it was really good and I ate it in fairly quick fashion. This was my last impression of Amsterdam before it was time to takeoff for our next destination, Billund, which you can read about here.