Netherlands

I did not know the Netherlands was a cheese country. That is an embarrassing sentence to write. I had walked past Gouda and Edam in supermarkets my entire adult life without once …

I saw Zaanse Schans because it came attached to something else. The tour I booked bundled Keukenhof with an afternoon here, which is why I had half a day in the tulip …

I had walked through Vondelpark in Amsterdam several times before I ever ate there. In April the pond carries floating beds of tulips, planted on black rafts and set out across the …

I have three of these on a shelf at home. They came from KLM flights, they are filled with Dutch gin, and each one is a scale model of a real building …

I walked into this building thinking I was looking at lilies. I walked out knowing I was not, and the correction came from a small white card on a plinth. That is …

I support Mercedes. I mention this because the last stretch of the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam is essentially a shrine to a Red Bull driver, and I walked into it as a …

I studied history. That is most of the explanation for this blog, and it is the whole explanation for why I will happily give an hour to one room in the Rijksmuseum …

I do not drink beer. I have said so in print before now, and it is still true, so the honest place to start is that I booked the Heineken Experience in …

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam takes a few hours to get through, and by the end of mine the paintings had stopped landing. The garden outside fixed that faster than a coffee would …

We went to Flow on the morning after King’s Day. King’s Day falls on 27 April and is the Dutch national holiday for the King’s birthday. The country spends it outdoors and …

People call the Rijksmuseum the Louvre of Amsterdam, and I understand why. Both are national collections in enormous nineteenth-century buildings, both are built around one painting everybody has come to see, and …

I do not drink beer. I booked a beer tour anyway, paid extra for the upgraded version of it, and spent an hour in a bar hidden behind a refrigerator door. That …