2nd Day in Amsterdam

Sunday
A much slower day...which was good! After a continental breakfast and a failed attempt to get tickets online for the Anne Frank house (not to be confused with Helen Keller), we went over to the Torture Museum. Not really worth it!! I don't see how we can spend $11 euro to see Rembrandts and Vermeers...and $7.5 euro to read printed out word documents about guillotines, racks & various other torture devices, look at a few pictures, and see a couple of pieces of equipment. Oh well... It was sort of interesting, but I didn't exactly learn anything. Afterwards, we wandered across town to the zoo, but didn't want to pay $20 euro to see the animals (its free in DC!!), so we declared that it was an excellent stroll and headed back towards the main part of town. After stopping for some lunch at an outdoor cafe, we went to southern Amsterdam for the Heineken Experience. Going into it, having been on other brewery tours in the states, I didn't see how it could be worth $15 euro. This was no ordinary brewery tour, they did a hell of a job marketing their product. They had the usual "here is the background, here are the ingredients, these are our mixing & fermenting bowls", but then they shook things up a bit. First, they let you taste the water/barley mix..a warm, sweet, and actually not that bad tasting mixture that exists before the hops are added. Then...they had an adventure ride...like we were at Kings Dominion or something. They called it the "Brew You" ride. Everyone stands on this platform that shakes you back and forth, spits water at you, drops you, rattles you etc as you go through the brewing cycle, bottling, etc. Ha...crazy! Then you stumble over to the next room where they give you a glass of Heineken, explain why there is a frosty head on it (its the hops!), explain the difference in smell before and after the first sips. Afterwards they had this lounge area--the entire ceiling was beer bottles...but not some trashy design like you are thinking when I just said that. This was more similar to a super-club atmosphere, green lights dancing behind the bottles in time with the music on the vidoes playing on the big screens throughout the room. Then you're taken through a room that shows the filling/bottling process (which was fake), another room where you can send a picture postcard email to anyone you'd like (your picture on a Heineken background). More various rooms with old posters, old bottle labels, and different bottle designs....it just went on and on. Try playing Edward 1.5Literhands with this Magnum Heineken. Finally you arrive in a bar area with widescreen tvs showing expansive visuals of different cities -- the image on each tv was linked to the next. Was neat. Here you were given 2 free Heineken's--the 0 degree kind. Excellent! All in all, we were there over 2 hrs, a well spent 15 euro! BTW, Heineken doesn't use any preservatives. It tastes so much better fresh here in Amsterdam, and explains why I've never been a huge fan before...haha! After the tour, we headed back to the hotel to chill for about an hour, then went to dinner at an Irish pub in Leidsplein Square. The square was busy, so we did plenty of people watching. There were a few street performers out and about. Pretty impressive for a Sunday evening-- I would have guessed that things would be dead. Not so much. Here we found were Dan Murphy spends most of his days. Ha. After a few beers, we headed back towards the hotel again and called it a night! It was a day not quite as loaded as Saturday...but lots of walking!