Day 19: Canal Tour, Heineken Factory tour

Canal Tour

Today in the morning we went on a tour of the canals. The boat that would take us through the canals was surprisingly large, and it was quite nerve-racking as the driver navigated the tight turns of the canals sometimes having to make 3-point turns and missing the edges of bridges by centimeters. My thought is that they must just scrape the bridges quite frequently as they were extremely narrow for such a large boat.

The tour itself was quite interesting with commentary on the different districts we were cruising past. I learnt that before the modern number address system, houses in the Netherlands used to each have their own logo artifact as a way of denoting their address. Overall, the tour was quite peaceful and informative, lasting for a few hours.

Heineken Tour

Later in the day we went to the Heineken experience tour, located at the first built Heineken brewery. It was quite interesting to learn about how the company came to be started by a young Amsterdammer named Gerard Heineken at age 22, as well as the marketing genius that Gerard became a major sponsor of many sporting events very early on. In part of the tour, they explained that the aroma of Heineken is meant to resemble banana, which I can now understand since it was pointed out to us.

The tour included 3 free Heinekens which had never tasted as good as they did right after spending a few hours looking at the beer making process that featured many animations of beer that were bound to make us all thirsty.

Later, we caught the train to look at Dam Square.