How to set up an internal domain with Route53 on AWS

I have a VPC on Amazon. Currently, it's running bind9 on one of the servers. It has records like this:

build           IN      A       172.aa.bb.cc
dev             IN      A       172.xx.yy.zz

This works fine, but in the interest of simplicity, I want to move its functionality to Amazon's Route53.

I've created a Private Hosted Zone on mydomain.local. I imported the db.mydomain.local file from bind9, and it created a few DNS records that look good to me. I noticed my records are added with the mydomain.local suffix, and I'd like them to still be available as shorthand (dev rather than dev.mydomain.local)

Next, I wanted to test if my configuration actually works. I stopped the bind9 service, and tried some nslookup commands, but those didn't seem to pick up the new config.

So, I have a few questions:

• Do I need to configure something on my server(s) to pick up the Route53 config?
• What is the easiest way to test this? I'm not at all familiar with nslookup or dig.

Any links to helpful documentation are also appreciated. I already read through Amazon's own documentation, but it doesn't seem to cover anything beyond creating the Private Hosted Zone itself.