Cheese, clogs and a chilled-out cat

       

Drugs are an ordinary part of life in Amsterdam, and many locals and tourists embrace the chance to legally buy them at coffee shops and smoke and drink on the street.  But perhaps more surprising is the fact that even some of the city’s animal residents get in on the action.

When we visited Baba Coffee Shop, famous for its mind-altering Space Cake, we met a sleek and smoochy black and white cat.

The mellowed moggie was sitting up on a bar stool alongside coffee shop patrons who were smoking all manner of substances, but this cool kitty didn’t seem to mind one little bit.

The shop assistant told us that the cat has been visiting the store for years and spends his days roaming around visiting various businesses in the red light district, which is packed with prostitutes, porn shops and live sex shows.

Of course Amsterdam is also the place that Anne Frank spent the last years of her life hiding from the Nazis during WWII, and it is home to traditional windmills, tulips, Dutch pancake houses, wooden clogs and cheese. 

And then there’s the Heineken beer factory, a Vodka-tasting museum, a sex museum and the world’s largest handbag museum (of course we visited them all!).

It turns out that all this time we’ve been drinking beer the wrong way.

Apparently, according to well-informed staff at the Heineken museum, you must take a big swig of beer (no sips allowed) and then swish the amber ale right around the inside of your mouth before swallowing it.  Our sweet tastebuds are at the front of our mouths and the savory ones are at the back—so if you guzzle your beer rather than swilling it around for a bit then you don’t get the full flavour.

Beer lovers might also be interested to know that beer is 92 per cent water, that in the early stages of production beer actually tastes like sweet corn, and that every day over 1 million bottles of Heineken are enjoyed in over 170 countries (the figure is even higher if you include Heineken's cans and draught beer). Most of all beer must have lots of head and be COLD.  Cheers.