amsterdam

We got to Amsterdam on November 18th for the weekend. This was a bigger group trip with more friends from work (Stockholm there was five of us and Amsterdam, there was nine!) and we stayed at the Generator Amsterdam Hostel! I’ve stayed at other Generator hostels and they have all been clean, the staff are friendly, and great places to stay because they’re pretty central and reasonably priced.

friday

We landed on Friday evening, dropped our bags at the hostel, and went to eat. I found this Mexican place, Bardita, from the hostel’s recommendations map, so we went there for food. Honestly, I picked it because in their about section, it says “It’s your designated hangout for a dirty dance and a cocky cocktail.” Since getting dirty and dancing was now my new catch phrase (see Stockholm post for context), I knew we had to try it out! To my dismay, there was no dirty dancing to be found and the service was slow for food. I think we had about five drinks before the food came out. They were understaffed for the evening, so I felt bad, but despite the service being slow, the food was great as were the drinks! After dinner, we went to a bar right next door called Bar Bukowski for a couple of drinks. We decided to travel into the center of the city to an Irish pub of all places (of course!) because they were supposed to have live music, but it had ended before we got there. If you’re looking for an Irish pub in Amsterdam, Mulligans Irish Music Bar is a fun place to go! We ended up back at the hostel where we discovered that they had a club that stayed open way too late. They had a fun DJ so we spent a few hours there dancing, before going to bed (another 4 am night…). It was a fun first night in a new city!

saturday

We woke up a little worse for wear, so to help with the hangovers, we went to La Boutique Del Caffe for some coffee, smoothies, and breakfast. They unfortunately forgot my order for breakfast, but their coffee and smoothies were incredible. However, the only thing that was really going to help us was a hair of the dog and lucky for us, we were headed to the Heineken Experience right after breakfast! It was neat to walk through the brewery and take a tour of the history of Heineken and see how the beer is made. Plus, you get a mini beer on the tour and two at the end! We also paid extra to go onto the rooftop, where we met the nicest bartender. She gave us an extra free beer and that definitely helped end the hangovers 🙂 They also had these awesome glasses that have ridges on the side, which she explained are there to help people with Parkinson’s hold their glasses (I did Google this to confirm and I don’t see any articles on it, so take it with a grain of salt). I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but my grandfather had Parkinson’s and I distinctly remember how challenging it was for him to grip things, so this was really cool to me.

After the tour, we walked along the canals to our next stop, fries at Fabel Friet. Apparently, Dutch people love their fries and they love to pair them with frietsaus, or fries sauce, that’s basically mayo but leaner and sweeter. They had all sorts of combinations of fries and sauce, truffle mayo, cheese, etc. I was ecstatic because I get bullied at home for dipping my french fries in mayo and it’s so NORMAL in the Netherlands (and also the UK!). My kind of people!! After fries, we went on our wine and cheese canal tour. I have to mention that it was so very cold this day. Unexpectedly so. None of us were really dressed for the freezing temperatures and I’m so glad our canal tour was on a boat that was enclosed. We had a fantastic tour guide and it was incredible to see the city via the canals (since there are so many!). After the canal tour, we had to warm up so we stopped in Cafe Biljart for a pint. We continued along the canals and stopped in La Perla for some much needed pizza. After that, we bopped around to a few bars and had a great time! I don’t have the names of the bars because this was a few months ago now and I didn’t take pictures of the bar names at this point in the night! We ended the night back at the hostel lobby with McChickens and Heinekens. A+ end to the night, if you ask me!

sunday

Our last day in Amsterdam started with brunch at Blue Amsterdam. The restaurant has 360-degree views of the city which was beautiful! The portions were huge and the food was delicious. After brunch, we went to Bloemenmarkt, which is the world’s only floating flower market. I won’t lie, I was a little disappointed at the lack of actual flowers at the market, but given that we went in mid-November, it wasn’t peak flower season so they had lots of other bits and bobs that were cute to look at. I definitely want to go back to the Netherlands in the spring when the tulip festival is happening! We did some wandering around the city, stopped in some cheese shops, walked down the Red Light District during the daytime (an interesting experience), and stopped in a few pubs to warm up because it was still freezing! The pubs we visited were Sports Bar, Temple Bar (keeping with our need to always go to an Irish pub), and Cafe de Zeevaart (in the Red Light District, just a traditional Dutch pub). Before we had to catch our flights, we stopped one more time for friets at Freddy Fryday. Overall, we had a fantastic time and it was a perfect weekend trip!