Amsterdam- in which we ate raw herring (on purpose)

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Originally uploaded by klheckert

After our big pub crawl, we have taken the rest of the time in Amsterdam to relax and enjoy the city and being on vacation.

The one additional real "tourist" thing we did was the Bols headquarters tour. Bols makes all kinds of different liquors including "Geniver" (which they invented and still make today, was the precurser to Gin), and were once part of the West India Trading company- the largest company in the world for quite a long time. In addition to learning those facts, this was a great tour that really let you play- as you will see in the photos, they have a whole room set up with each of their flavors of liquor where you can smell each scent. They also have a "taste experience" where you are given a flavor strip and watch a video for 30 seconds, which shows all kinds of different fruits- it's not until the fruits finish flashing that you can successfully identify the flavor as vanilla (thus indicating the very strong link between sight and taste). At the end of the tour, we got to sample the products- always the best part. ;)

To continue the taste adventure as we left the tour I got a type of street food you probably only find in Amsterdam- a raw herring sandwich. Served on bread, with pickles and onions. Sounds terrible, but was actually very good- I managed to get Matt to try a bite, and even he said it was much better than he expected.

Today we finally got to rent bikes, as the rain stopped! We took a quick ferry across to Northern Amsterdam and rode for a couple hours through parks, along canals, dikes, and a windmill. It was a beautiful ride, and even stopped in the middle for a mini-picnic, and played on a very small footbridge over a creek (see the photos- I think this was probably intended as playground equipment for kids, but we enjoyed it too!)

We sampled an Indonesian feast for dinner, called a "rijsttafel" (rice table), which included 10 different small plates of vegetables, eggs, fish, shrimp, chicken and beef- it was well worth the splurge- there is a photo of this as well :)

Early tomorrow morning we head to Berlin on a 6 hour train ride, so auf wiedersehen for now!

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