Netherlands - Amsterdam
4 Days in Amsterdam
From May 4 to May 8, we traveled to Amsterdam.
Wednesday, May 4, 2022
Day 1: We were in Seattle for a couple days and flew direct to Amsterdam on Delta One. We were flying on standby and did not have a hotel until we had confirmed seats on the flight. We booked our hotel on an app called “Hotel Tonight”. The flight was 9.5 hours and we landed in Amsterdam about 2:30 in the afternoon. We took an Uber to the Beethoven Hotel located a little out of the center of Amsterdam but still close enough where we could ride the tram. After settling down for a little while, we took another uber to the Central Station where we picked up our 3 day tram passes.
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Day 2: We ate breakfast at the Beethoven Hotel and headed to a nearby park named Vondelpark. It was a nice park to leisurely walk thru. We also stopped at a little coffee shop called Pluk, did a little shopping, and stopped at this famous cookie shop called Van Stapele, recommended to us by my cousin Preston. These chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips in them were to die for! I still dream about eating them to this day! In the afternoon, we headed to our canal tour with “Those Dam Boat Guys”. Our amazing tour guide was Larva. He was very informative and I’m glad we went with this tour company. It only fits maybe 8-10 people and we were able to not only interact with our tour guide, but also see the Amsterdam canal and structures without any glass panes blurring our vision. I highly recommend this company. After the canal tour we ate at a Chinese restaurant before heading to the Red Light District. This area is normally more lively at night. We then stumbled upon an Irish bar called Molly Malone and had a drink or two, stopped at the Abraxas Coffee Shop, and I had to try their specialty item at McDonalds.
Friday, May 6, 2022
Day 3: On day three of our trip to Amsterdam, we booked a food tour that we found on AirBnB Experiences called Amsterdam’s Market Street Food Tour. On our way to the meeting point, we stopped off at a park called Sarphatipark. We then proceeded to meet up with our tour to eat some Dutch, Surinamese, or Indonesian food. All the food we ate was located in the Albert Cuyp Market, one of the largest food market in Amsterdam, or around the area of the market. We learned from our tour guide, Inbal, that Surinamese and Indonesian people are the second and third biggest influences in Amsterdam. We highly recommend doing this food tour. Everything was so good and Inbal was very knowledgable about these different cultures.
Here’s a list of the foods we ate or drinks we drank:
Mull Wine and Dutch Cookie
Brioche Bread
Pastel filled with meat, vegetables, and vermicelli with chutney
Herring, Fried Cod, and drank Bokma (Dutch alcohol)
Surinamese Pom Sandwiches on French bread with a spicy chutney
Poffertjes
Stroopwafels
Arabic coffee & tea
Baka Banna - Fried plantain
Patat Oorlog - Dutch fries or war fries because there is a war between the mayo and peanut sauce, and it is topped with minced onions
On the tour, we tried 10 different foods or drinks and were so tired that we had to take a little nap before dinner. We decided to go back toward the city center to have dinner. We had Febo, a fast food place that served Dutch food, and eventually settled down to eat dinner at a Greek restaurant called Zorba.
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Day 4: On day 4 of our trip, we celebrated my birthday by going on a tulip tour. We took a tour that took us to Keukenhof to look at all the tulips! It was towards the end of the tulip season so if you plan to go to Amsterdam or the Netherlands for tulips, you need to go sometime in April. Although the tulips weren’t as abundant as they are in April, they were still really pretty.