24 Hours in Amsterdam

The whole trip was a highlight for me. Actually, being IN Amsterdam was the highlight. To understand why, you must first understand how I got there.

This was a last-minute trip. Travelocity has last-minute specials on their site, and air and hotel to Amsterdam from NYC for was too good to pass up. I was able to convince a colleague that flying off to Amsterdam for a weekend was a great idea.

Barely making it to the airport on time, we joked along the way about what we would do if we were late for our flight and didn't get on.

I get to the airport and the ticket counter person at JFK tells me that I cannot fly. The date was January 26th. My passport expires March 19th of the same year. She told me that according to her system, my passport had to be valid for 3 months from the date of travel, which means had I flown the weekend of the 19th, I would have been fine.

I was confused. I had called the consulate for the Netherlands soon after booking the trip to see what visa or other requirements existed. The consulate said there were none, so I was pretty shocked--I didn't know if I should laugh or cry, so I just laughed.

Sending my coworker on the flight, my last words to him were, "I'll see you at the hotel tomorrow morning." The next day, I got my passport extended and arrived in Amsterdam 24 hours later than I should have. This left me time to enjoy the city for literally 24 hours.

Therefore, the highlight for this weekend was being in Amsterdam. It didn't matter if I just sat in my hotel room all day--that would have been good enough for me.

By the way, Amsterdam has the most lenient immigration policy. I didn't even fill out an customs form for entry! When I got to Amsterdam, the customs agents all assured me that I would have been fine to enter the country with my passport expiring less than 3 months later. As long as my passport is valid during the time of travel, I am safe. Let this be a warning to everyone--apparently this passport rule is common knowledge. Beats me...

Quick Tips:

1. Drink as much coffee as you can. Dutch coffee is really good. Even the hotel's in-room coffee was excellent. I miss the taste and flavor of Dutch coffee. And it's cheap, too. At one coffee shop, my latte was .50. I had three.

2. Check out the markets; they are everywhere. I like to see how same products that we use in the US are packaged differently. I also like to wander down the snack isle--paprika Pringles? Why?

3. Take a train to the center instead of cabbing it. I thought I would need a cab, but the tram was so easy and so close to the center.

Best Way To Get Around:

Biking is the best way to get around the city. Take it from a gal who does not bike. I am a cab girl and found biking very enjoyable. Not only did I save myself a lot of time, but aimlessly wandering on a bike doesn't feel like aimless wandering. Had I done everything by foot and tram, I would not have covered a lot of ground.

Even in the frigid weather biking was still fun. After my thighs and toes froze over and I couldn't feel anything, it was all downhill!

Being my first time in Amsterdam, I just choose brand-name lodging smack in the middle of the touristy area. I knew I didn't have time to get lost and find my way around, so a hotel on Damrak was great--there was no confusion about how to get back to my hotel.

Since I only had 24 hours in Amsterdam, the hotel served more as a regrouping area. Again, due to its proximity to the center of town, it was great to stop in every 2 hours or so to drop off things I've purchased or to just simply put on more layers of clothes, as the weather was FRIGID.

It's actually a very small hotel. It reminded me of a small boutique hotel in NYC, rather than a major hotel chain. The rooms are clean and of a standard European size. If you ask for two twin beds, expect them to be pushed together. If you are sharing a room with someone you rather not be in the same bed with, this might be a problem.

Note: the showers are kinda funny. There is a flapping half-glass thing that shields the rest of the bathroom from the shower pressure. But because it covers only half of the tub, the bathroom still gets wet. I'm not quite sure what the logic is. It's kinda interesting.

"Werck Restaurant and Cafe Bar is in the heart of the Jordaan quarter, in the former coach house of the Westerkerk Church," from www.werck.nl.

We randomly wandered into Werck after visiting the Anne Frank House just next door. Its architecture and exterior decor was what attracted us to this restaurant. That, and we went to the back of the building first, where you were able to see the entire kitchen through floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Curious as to what type of food they were serving, we went around to the front to find a really cute restaurant. At first, I wasn't sure if it was a restaurant or a lounge that served food. The interior reminded me of a lounge in the Meatpacking District of NYC.

This is the first place where I didn't feel like a tourist. I took on the ambience of the restaurant and felt as though I was a local having a casual dinner with a friend, as I would in NYC. We were probably the only people in the building who were tourists. There were two girlfriends gossiping, a group of friends getting together for the first time in a month, a couple on a date, and several people lounging on the sofas having cocktails.

I would see this place turning into a hot nightspot after the kitchen closed, but we didn't stick around long enough to find out.

The cuisine is Asian fusion. For an appetizer, I had the tuna sashimi, and for dinner, a salmon dish. Their house bread comes with a garlicky-tasting butter. This garlic butter spread, as I was calling it, was the BEST-tasting bread spread ever! Even with the little time I had in the city, I laboriously scoured the isles of four major supermarkets looking for something like this to take home. Coming up empty-handed, I realized that it was a house specialty.

I would recommend this restaurant to anyone looking to get a glimpse and feel for life in Amsterdam. Due to time limitations, I didn't have the luxury of understand the psyche of locals, but 2 hours at Werck made me feel like Amsterdam was my home.

Pannekoekenuis is the name of this "upstairs pancake" house. We actually went to the wrong pancake house. Apparently there was one that is suppose to be the best. The original pancake house was recommended to me by four people who are totally unrelated to each other. It didn't surprise me to find out that we went to the wrong place. Once person described the place we should have gone as being so good that she went twice in one day.

This place is just okay. The crepes were good, but it was just the novelty of climbing up very steep stairs to enter a small dining area filled with trinky dinks, a cuckoo bird chiming the time every hour, and a man cooking and serving up crepes while wearing an apron.

I wish I had gone to the correct pancake house--I blame member ANDREW!!