Day 2 - 20/06/23

 The second day of our journey began with a long lie in as we gained back the lost hours of sleep from the previous day’s journey. The other two left quite early to go and visit a museum, but seeing as I didn’t fancy spending the 20 euro entry charge and I wasn’t too interested in the museum anyway, I decided to have a productive lie-in instead. Unfortunately, this lie-in was interrupted by the previously mentioned loud snoring woman, who had now transitioned from snoring to sleep talking too. 

After relaxing all morning I made my way to the metro station to visit the ‘Heineken Experience’, where we learnt lots about the history of Heineken and how they make their beers. It turns out that the process of making beer is actually quite simple, which is probably why they had to repeat themselves about 4 times along the tour just to fill up the time. They tactically kept us interested by leaving the complimentary beers until right at the end, which were also delicious, although they only served half pints!

We then made our way back to the hostel in the sweltering 30 degree Amsterdam heat, which was then followed by a gigantic thunderstorm in which Jagan unfortunately got caught in. We had some sandwiches for lunch and then had a nap, which was again interrupted by the Kiwi woman complaining that someone had stolen her phone on the train (she later found it in a bin apparently so I’m not sure how that happened). After a quick shower we set off again to the centre.

We found a nice bar in the Red Light District, which was unfortunately directly next to a brothel so we had some interesting passers by as we sat outside. We quickly came to the realisation that the obscure beer they had was actually 8.5% alcohol, so we spent the rest of the night enjoying those and watching the world go by. At about 1am we got a taxi home and fell straight to sleep. Now that I am leaving the Netherlands, I’ve realised that it’s perfectly met what I expected it to be. There are lots of windmills, everybody is very tall and everybody cycles everywhere. The most important lesson that the UK could learn from Amsterdam though is that you don’t need to dress like a shit power ranger in order to ride a bike.