Van Gogh, House of Bols, Heineken experience (Amsterdam Day 2)

On our second day in Amsterdam, we started off the day at the Van Gogh museum.  On the way there we stopped at the Museumplein Park where there was a huge I amsterdam sign and big fountain.  The Van Gogh museum housed most of Van Gogh’s original paintings along with many originals from the artists that inspired him such as Monet and Gaugin.  We definitely learned a lot about Van Gogh.  For example, Cara’s favorite painting by him, the Almond Blossom, was painted for his brother Theo's newborn son after he was born.  Van Gogh’s sister in law, his brother Theo's wife, dedicated much of her life after Vincent and Theo Van Gogh passed to promoting his work and it is greatly because of her that Van Gogh is as successful as he was after he died.

Across the street from the museum was the "House of Bols" distillery where you can learn about the Bols family and the genever (which was the precursor to gin) and liqueurs they make.  We decided to eat lunch first since the tour included a tasting and cocktail.  The House of Bols was pretty neat.  Bols makes the number one liqueur in Amsterdam and is exported worldwide, even to the United States.  The tour was very interactive and included a sniffing test, a bartender lesson, a tasting and a cocktail.  We each got to choose our favorite cocktail along with 2 samples of genever or liqueur. 

After the House of Bols, we went to the Heineken brewery.  This tour was also very interactive as well, along with a "4-D" video, a tasting, and many other fun things to do.  We made a music video in Dutch, saw many Heineken commercials from the 70s to the 90s in really comfortable green chairs, and received 2 free beers. 

After the distillery and brewery tours, we were pretty tired so we went back to the hostel to relax before dinner.  We ate dinner at a Mexican restaurant on the “ethnic aisle” where we all got unlimited fajitas!  They were so good and we definitely got our money’s worth.  After dinner we went to an Ice Bar that was literally made out of ice.  Our drink glasses were even made out of ice.  The actual ice room was very small so you could only go experience it for 30 minutes and in groups of 30.  It was very cold in there (about minus 12 degrees Celsius) so we were ok with only spending 30 minutes in there.  We then headed to a sports bar near our hostel where we hung out for a while.  We ended up sitting next to a guy from Columbia and his friend that was visiting from the U.S., who we talked to for a while.  We then headed back to our hostel and went to bed.