Amsterdam Days 1&2: Leidseplein, Pancakes, and Heineken

Easter weekend my friends and I decided to make the trek over to Amsterdam, Holland, in the Netherlands. Christine, Claire, Alex, Ramon, and I caught a bus to a train to the airport at 3:28 am on Friday. Our flight took off at 7:25, and we arrived in Amsterdam around 9:30.

After landing, I realized that there were no directions to our hotel on the hotel confirmation. Therefore, we had a small fiasco when we were trying to buy train tickets, tram tickets, etc., especially because most of the signs were written in Dutch. Finally, after a train ride and a tram ride (oh yea, and leaving Alex behind at one point), we managed to make it to our hotel. All of the hostels in Amsterdam were either sketchy or expensive, so we decided to use some of my dad's hotel points to reserve a room at the Hilton for the four nights that we would be there. We ended up with a room with one King-size bed for five people. Needless to say, some people ended upon the floor each night, but I think it worked out well nonetheless.

By the time we arrived at the hotel, we were all starving, so we asked the concierge where the best place to get food would be. He pointed us in the direction of the Leidseplein, which is the entertainment district in Amsterdam (not to be confused with the Red Light District). Here there are lots of places to eat, drink, and shop. We ended up eating at an Irish pub that served a variety of foods (for example, I got Thai food). Afterwards we were all pretty exhausted from pulling a near all-nighter, so we decided to take a nap before going out. After our nap we got ready and headed back to the Leidseplein for a pub crawl that we had hear about when we were there earlier. It was really, really fun! It brought us to 6 different bars/clubs throughout the Leidseplein (the boys & I only lasted through 5)and we got lots of free drinks (mostly Jagermeister shots and half-pints of Heineken or Grolsch - all native to the Netherlands) and a free t-shirt! Oh yes, and I can't forget that we discovered the downfall of the entire weekend on our way home: Wok to Walk. It is a fast-food Chinese restaurant that is absolutely delicious, however, I think we ate 50% of our meals there over the course of the weekend (the other 50% were probably poffertjes at Pancake Corner). Not one of our better choices...

Anyways, the following morning (Saturday), we woke up early to head over to the Heineken Brouwery. But, before we went there, we had to have Wok to Walk for lunch (see, there's a pattern developing already...). The Heineken Brouwery was really fun, and took up a larger chunk of our day than I had anticipated. The whole thing was very interactive, which made it really, really fun. You got to see the actual beer being brewed, help brew some beer yourself, sit in these really weird chairs to watch old commercials, pose for pictures with old advertisements, create-your-own Heineken commercial/video, bottle your own beer, and finally, you got to "brew yourself". This consisted of a little motion-simulator-esque ride where you stood up and they pretended that you were the beer being brewed, so you got to move through the giant copper things, be heated up, be stirred, be bottled, be transported, etc. It was pretty cool. It all ended at a bar where you could redeem your ticket for a free pint of Heineken (which, I must add, is a thousand times more delicious in Amsterdam than it is in the States). The ceiling there was made completely out of Henieken bottles, and all the tables had virtual coasters that detected the bottom of your glass and created a coaster underneath that moved when you moved your glass. COOL!

After the Heineken Brouwery, we went back to the Leidseplein and I had poffertjes for lunch at the Pancake Corner. Now, for a description: poffertjes are basically really delicious little pancakes (about the size of a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup) that you can get topped with whipped cream, ice cream, and fruit (yes, please!) They also had really delicious syrup there that tasted more like caramel than maple syrup, which made the poffertjes that much more delightful. It is possible that over the course of the weekend I ate my weight in poffertjes. Oops.

That evening we were all pretty exhausted, so we just stayed at Pancake Corner for drinks because they have a special on Jagermeister shots. However, we realized that none of us were very enthusiastic about drinking, so we just headed back to the hotel for an early night.