Netherlands

I went in expecting a tourist trap. A restaurant inside one of the busiest museums in Europe, named after the painter, with a captive audience of two million people a year who …

I was at the Rijksmuseum for the Night Watch, like almost everybody who books a ticket. That hangs at the far end of the Gallery of Honour, upstairs, and it is where …

A few days earlier I had stood in front of the Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum and admitted that I had never understood it. I knew it was a Rembrandt. That was …

I came out of the Willem-Alexander Pavilion with a vague piece of information and no map sense whatsoever. Somebody had mentioned an orchid exhibition. I had no idea where it was, so …

I had seen this painting perhaps four hundred times before I ever saw it. On fridge magnets, on tea towels, on postcards in every souvenir shop between Centraal and the Bloemenmarkt in …

I went up on King’s Day. That is the twenty-seventh of April, the loudest day of the Dutch year, and by early afternoon the canal below the brewery was full of boats …

In Amsterdam I went looking for stroopwafels and found them, at Hans Egstorf on the Singel. What I had never done, on that trip or any other, was eat a Dutch pancake. …

I had clogs filed under souvenir. Blue and white, palm-sized, sold in every shop between Dam Square and Centraal in Amsterdam. That was the whole of my thinking on the subject until …

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 …