Thursday 8th September – I am NOT happy with Amsterdam McDonalds!!!!!

---

It was a VERY wet night last night and our group had 1 well flooded tent, many flat lilos and quite a few wet bags (but some had been left in the orning and thought that that would stop them from getting wet... Yea right!)
Today was our free day in Amsterdam and guess who we hung out with... No, how did you guess? Yip, Tim and Carla (but that's ok because it was our last day together and they were going to do exactly the same as what we wanted to do). Today's mission... not to get too wet with the constant down pours!
Alex dropped us off on the outskirts of Amsterdam them everyone walked with out tour leader into the town centre (except us) because some of them were doing a free bike tour (which I am glad we pulled out of because they got incredibly wet!) but we went to find the Anne Frank house. We found the flower market that we walked down with Aunty Margareth and bought some little traditional clogs to hand up at home. We made it to the Anne Frank house (with a few minor detours under shop fronts to avoid the rain) and were lucky because we were able to walk straight in (Unlike the 1km long line last time we were in Amsterdam). It was great to be able to look through the house and I am now going to go home and read the book!
Learning all this history in all these different countries really makes me regret not doing more of this at high school – although I didn't really see the point in doing any of this type of stuff back then)!
Maccas for lunch today and how is this for rude... we had already PAID for our meals and Steve needed the toilet but was told he then had to PAY for that! Stupid places that charge for the use of the toilet!
After this we went to the place Steve was looking forward to the most and I not so... the Heineken Museum. We arrived and it was so wet outside that my jacket had soaked straight through onto my jersey. We checked in all our bags, got our tickets then went into the place. After about 5 minutes I was thinking we were going to be out of the place in 10 minutes (and that would be a major rip off!) but it definitely got better as we went further in. We found out about the history of Heineken beer, how to do a real taste test of good quality beer (and Yes boys, we were told that you have to take BIG mouths full of Heineken), how Heineken beer is made and got to have some fun with their machines. We had a lot of fun with the photo machine and the music video machine then e-mailing things to ourselves and family (Hope you enjoyed your pictures Mum and Dad B and Mum C!!!). We ended up spending close to 3 hours in the museum then at the end we were given 2 free Heinekens (they weren't even big ones and some how they went straight to my head!). While at the bar we saw one of the bar tenders give out a free Heineken coaster... but not just any Heineken coaster... it was massive. And by the time we left the place Steve had one and we scored another 2 (which we used as Thank-you cards for our driver and tour leader... the cook got a cruddy small one from a random cafe!).
Tonight we went out for dinner at the Sea Palace (the funny floating restaurant we looked at Aunty Margareth) and it was delicious... we were at tables of 4 and there was not a lot of room to move when all the food had arrived! Most of us were rolled out of there at the end of the night. Afterwards half the people went into Amsterdam to have a drink and the other half of us caught the tram (which is more like a train) back to near our campsite, which wasn't really that near because we had to walk another 20 minutes to get to the campsite from the tram stop. On the plus side, it wasn't raining anymore but everything was still wet... puddles are really hard to avoid in the rain!
Off 'home' tomorrow so looking forward to that but also not (if you know what I mean!)
That's me over and out!
XX

---

Photos

Photo 2
Steve and Tim at the entrance to the Heineken museum

Photo 3
Hehe

Photo 4
Past Heineken labels

Photo 5
Carla and I learning to taste test beer