The Travelling Pixie in Amsterdam

20150701: Amsterdam; Netherlands [Day 3]

We woke up early in the morning to head to the long awaited Amsterdam!  The first thing we did when we arrived at the Amsterdam Central Station was to purchase the 3-day Amsterdam City Card (There’s also the option of 1-day, 2-day or 4-day passes).  I simply couldn’t stress enough how great the Amsterdam City Card was!  For 69 Euros, we get 3 days of unlimited travel on the subway, bus and trams within the city as well as free admission to a range of museums.  For an extra 10 Euros we could get a day-trip card to the outside of Amsterdam for sightseeing (eg. Zaanse Schans).  This day trip card is 13.50 Euros without the Amsterdam City Card, so I’d say its a pretty good deal to get the Amsterdam City Card and spend one day travelling to the more remote areas.

After we’ve got our card, we took the bus to where we’ll be staying for the next two nights – BB by Servio!  It’s a small and cozy B&B about 15 minutes away from The Heineken Experience.  It’s hosted by Servio (as you could probably tell from the name of the B&B) where he lives with his boyfriend and Boris the Cat in one of the rooms.  There are a total of 3 guest rooms that I could make out in the building, and we stayed up in the attic room – which has its own ensuite bathroom and toilet (no more of that shower but no toilet nonsense we experienced back in Utrecht!).  The only problem with that room was the heat!  Having arrived Amsterdam right when the heatwave from Africa struck, we were simply roasted that night.  The windows were of no use – as they were on the ceiling and there was no breeze at all, we had nothing but a little fan in the room to keep the air circulating, but that was it – it really was one of the worst Summer nights I’ve ever had!  We didn’t sleep very well that night, which was why we ended up pretty exhausted the next day. 

Anyways, back to our first day in Amsterdam!

The first thing we did was walk to the Van Gogh Museum.

My boyfriend, being an art fanatic, urged me to go with him first thing after we left the B&B.  Good thing that the Van Gogh Museum was actually just 10 minutes away from where we’re staying.  We didn’t stay in the museum for too long though and sorry for posting a photo from my Netherlands Scrapbook, we weren’t allowed photos inside the museum!

After we left, we coincidentally passed through the IAMsterdam installation, only to find the whole park being set up for a festive occasion – which I have no idea what was happening, only that the place was flooded with people!  In addition to the boiling heat, all I could think of was to get away from there.

We went to the Heineken Experience which was just one street down from where we were.  The whole experience took much longer than what I had expected, almost 2 hours! – I’ve got the Heineken Experience filmed and will be uploaded onto Youtube!  Will post the link on here when its up!  Another thing about the Heineken Experience was that we got our names printed onto Heineken bottles for just 6.50Euros!  But the bottles are in London right now, so I’ll get the photo taken when I go back in September ;)

After our fabulous Heineken Experience, we took the free boat tour that comes with the purchase for entrance into the Heineken Experience all the way to the Heineken brand store, about half an hour’s boat ride away – we also got two free Heineken glasses with a voucher that was given to us along with the boat tickets.

After stopping by the Heineken Brand Store, we decided to walk to an Argentinian Steak restaurant that comes with a 25% discount with the Amsterdam City Card (featured in the Netherlands Video ;) ).  We ended up barging through the Movie Premier of Magic Mike – which was a disaster for me as it was toooooo crowded and stuffy, as well as getting lost for half an hour before we found the restaurant!  Thank goodness we’ve finally found it!  With the 25% discount, it really was a great bargain!  The food wasn’t exceptionally amazing, but it was alright – especially when we ended up having dinner at 8:30pm, everything would’ve tasted great…

We ended our first day in Amsterdam after dinner and went back to our B&B feeling exhausted – mostly due to the heat!  Tomorrow we gotta wake up early and head to Zaanse Schans!  My long-awaited trip to see the infamous windmills of the Netherlands! x