Beer…

Day: 58

I had decided to take a tour of the Heiniken brewery today and had convinced (with little effort) Brooks and Hannah to come along.  It was only a few blocks from the hostel and by 11:30 we were learning about the wonderful world of brewing.  About ½ way through the tour we got to sample our first glass of the best part of brewing, beer.  A few minutes later we were back on the tour and playing with all the fun things they had to offer, like emailing pictures of yourself at the brewery to friends (Sarah and Aaron check your e-mails). After a few other cool things we learned about beer and the Heiniken family we headed to the bar near the exit for our other two beers that came with out 10 euro admission.

Sitting there during our first round a guy we meant on the tour came over and dropped an extra six beer tokens on our table. Score for us.  All the sudden our pre-lunch beer intake had doubled.  Then we made friends with a lone girl from Chicago who also had a couple of extra tokens, so we came up with a plan to get even more beer for free.  Every time you went to the bar you dropped your tokens into a glass and said how many you had just dropped.  We started to go up to the bartender, drop two tokens and say “four”.  With our surplus of beer tokens and our foolproof system this granted each of us roughly eight beers instead of our designated 3 that came with the tour. Just before we left we thought it would be good to send Brooks to the bar with no tokens and see if he could say “Four.” And get us more beer, unfortunately I think the bartender had caught on and asked him where his chips were. Bummer.

Quite inebriated we headed out to find some lunch, everyone’s first meal of the day.We (Myself, Hannah, Brooks, and our new friend Laura) had sandwiches and beer in a pub about a block from the brewery and after lunch headed down to chill out by the canal and have a smoke.  The day was flying by with fun activities.  After a relaxing hour of so (except for Hannah, who couldn’t handle her booze and threw up in the grass), we headed back to our room where I passed out and Brooks and Laura spent a couple more hours indulging in Amsterdam’s primary tourist draw.

When I woke up around 6pm I headed out to get some afternoon pictures and find an internet café to get all my posts from the last couple of days up.  I spent an hour or so doing that, went out to dinner alone at “Zorba the Greek” then went back to the hostel to see what everyone was up to.Spent the night just hanging out in the hostel bar, drinking beer and smoking a little until it was time to head off to bed because I wanted to be up early for tomorrow when it looks like I’ll have to leave Amsterdam because there is no room for me on this holiday weekend (Queens Day).