The City of Canals

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What a place to spend the last few days of this trip. Amsterdam has so many different things to do, in all different areas of the city. We started the morning with a tour of the city, with the same company that handled our Barcelona and Prague tours. I have yet to be disappointed with them, and they've showed us around each city quite thoroughly.


We went through all different parts of the city, including the canals, the old city walls, the red light district, and the old religious areas. Every area of the city was covered. It'll be a great city to explore for the next few days. One of the cool things about a trip like this is that you start to realize how old everything in Europe is. Amsterdam has been around for coming up on a millennium. As have many of the cities that I've visited.




After the tour, we went to the House of Bols. Bols, the subject of the museum, is the oldest liquor company in the world, and in fact invented genever, which gave birth to gin. They had a testing room, which you could smell 36 different flavors of their liquors. They also talked about their bottles, which have been scientifically designed to an impressive level to improve bartender speed and efficiency.




At the end of the tour, the museum lets you test a cocktail made with Bols, and also gives you two free tastes of their liquor directly. It was quite a fancy museum and tasting area, and it was really cool to actually experience a proper tasting like that. We headed back by way of Vondelstraat, which is the street where Marie used to live, and where both the hotel and author's house in the movie The Fault in Our Stars were apparently filmed. We stopped to snap a few photos, then walked back to the hotel, to get ready to find a place for dinner, followed by a local club or bar to celebrate the last city.

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Photos

A statue in the red light district
It actually represents the discretion of the area: you don't know who the author, the male or female models are, nor would you see it without looking down