During this past summer, I was backpacking around Europe with various friends at various times. Our first stop was the Netherlands, and upon arriving in Amsterdam our small group signed up for the elusive Heineken brewery tour.
The tour shifted quickly from a simple beer tasting to a series of increasingly bizarre hallways and rooms, none of which seemed remotely related to brewing beer. One moment we were amongst a selection of ping pong tables and virtual soccer games, and the next we were surrounded by flashing mirrors in what could only be described as a miniature night club.
As we were nearing the end of the self-guided tour — though at the time we had no notion of our position in the maze — we passed a seemingly innocuous hole at the base of a wall. The people in the hall around our group streamed past, but we stopped to examine it.
It was a small sort of hatch, with metal handles that, in my eyes, would be the perfect aide to propel oneself through. I bent to peer through the hole and saw nothing but dark shadows.
At this point, it was clear that this was not a part of the tour, but I was already too committed to the mystery of what lay behind the wall. So, with great enthusiasm, I crouched down and slid into the gap.
Anticlimactically, there was nothing behind the wall. It seemed to be a tiny sort of storage area with a few boxes and a close section of drywall that left little room to maneuver. I crawled back out, shrugged, and began to walk away with my group. But in seeing me climb out of the wall, a line began to form outside of the hole. One tourist after another filed into the tiny storage area, thinking that I had been exploring something vastly important to the Heineken experience.
For the rest of the day, it is likely that each person who saw someone exit the hole joined the queue, and was subsequently extremely disappointed.
Space Case Backpacker 