Amsterdam was really fun. If you stay within a mile or two of the central station, everything is in walking distance. There is also a bus, which we never took, but i heard is extremely easy to get around and navigate. I won’t share all of my stories from my visit there (they’re a little NSFW haha), but I will tell you about some places of interest.

The Heineken Brewery tour and boat ride was not that bad. Heineken apparently has a monopoly on the beer in Amsterdam, so you may as well tour the facility. Several free beers come with the tour, and we also got to practice pouring our own beer from the tap (extra free beer). After we finished drinking, we walked across the street for our included canal boat tour. Be advised, they don’t announce when they leave, so you will need to stand at the entrance of the boat the entire time until someone says you can board it. At the end of our tour we got dropped off at A’Dam lookout, where we were able to go to the rooftop and swing out over the city. From there you can board a free ferry that takes you across the canal to the central station. You can either turn left and walk down the red light district, or grab a bite to eat. We wanted to eat local foods on the trip, which was pretty hard because Amsterdam was similar to NYC. There’s Chinese, Italian, pizza, hamburgers, steak house, dessert shops, etc. everywhere as opposed to strictly local cuisine. We did enjoy some cheese fries with a truffle mayonnaise sauce I think, which is native there. We also stopped at a bar and had absinthe and bitterballen- a fried gravy meatball.

The next morning we visited the Anna Frank Museum. Be advised, you should purchase tickets with time-slots 2 Months in advance! If you don’t, you may wait in line all day and still not be able to walk inside the place she once called home. right down the street is a Cheese “museum.” It is more of a cheese store with a photo booth in the mini basement, but there are like 50 different cheeses on display you can taste as well as house-made condiments. The cheeses are vacuum sealed, so you can take them with you on the flight home. The goat smoked gouda cheese and fig mustard are amazing! There is also an amazing pancake restaurant and tulip museum nearby too.

We didn’t have time to stop at the Rijks or Van Gogh Museums (also buy your tix in advance), but we did walk by the botanical gardens, on our way to the Artis Zoo & Micropia. The zoo was really fun with a lot of free roaming animals! The micropia is currently the only museum of its kind, with hundreds of different microbes on display. Everything about the Micropia is audio sensory and interactive. I highly suggest making it a point of interest!