The Wooden Shoe Workshop at Kraaienest 4 runs on the same principle as the Catharina Hoeve cheese farm a few minutes along the path. Museum first, demonstration second, shop third. It is a commercial building and it makes no secret of that. It is also free to enter, and the collection inside holds one of the largest gatherings of wooden shoes in the Netherlands.

The Wooden Shoe Workshop at a Glance
🥾 What it is · A free clog museum, workshop and shop at Zaanse Schans, opened 1974, holding one of the largest wooden-shoe collections in the Netherlands.
💍 The collection · Chip-carved wedding clogs, 1675 church clogs from Hindeloopen, a world case (roller-skate clogs and all), art clogs and a Swarovski-covered Diamond Clog.
🪓 The craft · Antique cast-iron machines cut a clog from a fresh poplar block on the principle of a key cutter; mastering it by hand took about seven years.
🛡️ The surprise · A traditional wooden clog is CE-certified safety footwear, an accepted alternative to steel-toed boots.
💡 Tip · Turn left and do the museum before the shop; pair it with the cheese farm along the same path.

Into the Warehouse

Jaap and Ineke Kooijman opened the workshop on 1 April 1974, in a timber warehouse called De Vrede. Theirs was the first business to set up at Zaanse Schans, and the family still runs it, now into a third generation. The museum occupies the front of the building, which means the collection comes before the machines and the machines come before the till.

The first thing on the wall is a set of black and white photographs, mounted on dark timber boards.

Every person in them has wooden shoes on. A woman stands in a doorway with children gathered at the step. A yard full of men and boys line up for a works photograph. A row of schoolchildren watch someone crouched over a patch of soil. A group stands among bare trees, some sitting on the ground. Nobody is dressed up for the camera. The clogs are simply what they had on their feet that day.

Below the photographs sit objects from the same working world. A large stone wheel is set in a heavy timber frame, and a wooden sack barrow leans against the boards beside it, its handles worn pale.

The oldest wooden shoe found anywhere in the Netherlands has been dated to around 1250, which puts the habit comfortably past its thousandth year. Until industrial shoemaking took over, nearly everyone wore them. Every district had its own maker working to his own outline, and a glance at somebody’s feet gave away where they came from.

The Wedding Clogs of Gerrit Fraaij

A few steps further in, the tone changes completely. One case holds clogs carved so densely that the wood looks embroidered. Rosettes, chip-carved borders, six-pointed stars worked across the toe and up over the instep, and on one pair a band of interlocking teardrops running the length of the shoe. They are the work of Gerrit Fraaij, a carver from the Zaan region who spent years of weekends here demonstrating how it was done. They are also wedding clogs.

A bridegroom would commission bridal clogs for the wedding day, cut with patterns standing for trust, hope, love and fertility. Afterwards the pair generally went on display in the best room of the house rather than back on anyone’s feet. That is why so many have come through in this condition, while the plain working pairs from the same villages have vanished almost entirely.

Sunday church clogs formed a class of their own again. The oldest in the collection come from Hindeloopen in Friesland and are dated to 1675.

Clogs from Everywhere Else

The full wooden shoe with a closed wooden toe is a Dutch speciality, but wooden footwear is not. One long case sets the Dutch versions against the rest of the world, shelf by shelf, each with a small country label.

The French shelf holds a broad, blunt-nosed pair in dark wood. The Portuguese one holds a slender pair in pale orange with a raised heel, carved as if the leather were still there. Elsewhere in the case sit woven and strapped forms, leather uppers tacked onto wooden soles, and a lacquered black pair that would not look out of place in a shoe shop today. Then, on a middle shelf, a pair of clogs with yellow roller-skate wheels bolted underneath.

A Poster and Two Watercolours

Above the cases hangs a large framed poster with a Paris printer’s line down the right-hand edge. Les Moulins qui Chantent, an operetta in three acts, libretto by Fonson and Wicheler, music by Arthur Van Oost. Two young women sit facing one another on the grass, a windmill behind each of them and a village between. Both are wearing painted clogs, one yellow and one red, and those clogs are the brightest thing in the picture.

Two smaller watercolours hang beside it. In the first, three men in traditional dress stand on brick paving, one holding a small bottle while the others hold glasses, all three in white clogs. In the second, two boys stand in a field, one leaning across to light something the other is holding to his mouth. Both pictures are signed at the lower edge.

The Clog as Art Object

Bas van Buuren studied audiovisual design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and specialised in film animation. Since 1992 he has painted and built work from ordinary factory-made clogs, which he calls klompjekten, or clogjects. His reasoning is set out on the wall in his own words. A clog is a wooden casing for a human foot, so it carries a person, and anyone looking at one imagines the person inside it.

One pair sits inside a gilt picture frame, painted in blocks of white, black, red, blue and yellow. It is an ode to Mondrian, and it works precisely because a clog has no straight edge anywhere on it, so the grid has to bend over the toe and break at the heel. Around it are others: a white pair with a blue tulip painted in Delft style, a pair patterned like fishnet, and a pair painted as bare feet, toes and all.

The Diamond Clog

The last case is lit differently from the rest. Inside it, raised on a black plinth and backed by a mirror, sits a single clog covered from toe to heel in crystals set so close together that no wood shows through at all.

It is called the Diamond Clog, and no, they are not diamonds. The stones are Swarovski crystals, in the thousands. The design came from Jan Roedema, an Amsterdam artist and worker in precious metals, who took his cue from Damien Hirst and from the shape of the clog itself. Standing in front of it, the mirror doubles the whole thing, which is either the point or a happy accident.

From Log to Clog

Through a doorway at the end of the museum, the building becomes a workshop. The floor is ankle-deep in pale shavings. Cast-iron machines stand in the middle of the room, a stove sits in one corner, and the walls are hung with rows and rows of clog blanks. Small hand-lettered signs above them name the timber: populier, poplar, pappel.

The demonstrator worked two machines in turn. The first traces a finished model shoe with a stylus while revolving knives cut the same shape into a fresh block, on exactly the principle of a key cutter. The second machine repeats the trick on the inside, hollowing the block with a rotating drill, and the frame tilts partway through so the drill can reach up into the nose.

The wood has to be around 60 per cent water to cut cleanly, so only fresh poplar or willow goes on the machines. Heel and toe are finished by hand afterwards with a paalmes, a long-handled knife pivoted at one end, and the whole shoe is smoothed on a sanding belt. A skilled maker working entirely by hand needed at least two hours for a pair. The demonstration I watched took about ten minutes.

The Shop

Then the doors open onto the shop, which is the largest of its kind in the country and makes no apology for it. Wooden shoes in every size hang floor to ceiling. So do slippers, keyrings, money boxes and miniatures. One wall is given over to plain unpainted clogs mounted on old timber boards, each holding a bunch of painted wooden tulips, with a small white card in the middle showing the price.

Which brings me back to where I started. Having spent an hour learning that the clog is a certified safety shoe, a wedding gift, a regional identifier and an art object, I went to the counter and bought a small blue and white ceramic one.

I am not going to defend it. The windmill sits inside a little heart, the flowers are transfer-printed, and Holland runs across the side in script. It cost very little and it does exactly what that kind of object is meant to do, which is sit on a shelf at home and bring back an afternoon.

Bubbly Tips

• Getting there from Amsterdam. Zaanse Schans sits roughly sixteen kilometres north-west of the city centre. The Sprinter from Amsterdam Centraal to Zaandijk Zaanse Schans takes about seventeen minutes, and the village is a walk of ten to twenty minutes from the platform along the river. Bus 391 leaves from the IJ side behind Centraal, takes about forty minutes, and stops at the village entrance, which is the better option with a pushchair or a bad knee.
• Entry is free, for now. The village and the Wooden Shoe Workshop both cost nothing to enter. Zaanstad council approved a €17.50 visitor charge in 2025, then postponed it twice; spring 2027 is the current target and it remains in dispute. Check before you travel rather than assuming either way. Individual windmill interiors and the Zaans Museum charge separately regardless.
• There is no demonstration timetable. Staff start when enough people have gathered, so plan to linger rather than arrive at a set time. If you want to see it properly, stand by the machines rather than drifting into the shop, and give it fifteen minutes of patience.
• Do the museum first, deliberately. The collection runs along the front of the building and plenty of visitors walk straight through it to the till. Turn left when you come in and work the cases slowly. The carved wedding clogs and the world display are the two worth the most time.
• The opening hours are better than the rest of the site. From March to October the workshop runs 08:00 to 18:00, which is wider at both ends than the nine-to-five most Zaanse Schans locations keep. An early start here is the single easiest way to dodge the coach groups.
• Photographing the Diamond Clog. The case is dark, mirrored and glazed, so a flash will bounce straight back at you and a phone will hunt for focus. Get the lens close to the glass, turn the flash off, and let the case lighting do the work.
• Try a pair on before you buy one. The shop keeps sizes out for exactly this. Wooden shoes take thick socks and a slightly shuffling walk, and ten seconds of standing in a pair will tell you more than any amount of admiring them on a shelf.
• Pair it with the cheese farm. Catharina Hoeve is a few minutes along the same path and follows an identical rhythm of display, demonstration and shop. Doing both back to back takes well under two hours and gives you the whole Zaanse Schans formula in one go.
• Look for the giant clog on the path. It sits a short walk beyond the workshop itself, out where the paths meet near the drawbridge. Mornings put the sun behind it, so late afternoon gives you the better light and the emptier frame.

Final Thoughts

What changed my mind was not the crystal one. It was the wall of photographs at the entrance, where nobody is posing and everybody, down to the smallest child on the step, is standing in wooden shoes on wet ground. After that, the wedding pairs cut with symbols for trust and hope stop looking like folk craft and start looking like something people spent real money on, once, for a day that mattered.

The rest of it follows from there. A shoe that every village made slightly differently, that a bridegroom commissioned, that still passes European safety certification, and that an artist can grid up in Mondrian’s colours and put in a gilt frame. I went in thinking of a fridge magnet and came out with an argument. And, admittedly, with a small ceramic clog that has a windmill in a heart on the side of it.

Until next time!

The post Wooden Shoe Workshop, Zaanse Schans: Inside the Clog Museum appeared first on Bubbly Living.

That is an embarrassing sentence to write. I had walked past Gouda and Edam in supermarkets my entire adult life without once joining those words to a map, and I had built a picture of this country out of windmills, tulips, canals and painters with no dairy in it anywhere. Then I spent forty minutes in a black timber shed at Zaanse Schans and had to rearrange the whole thing.

Catharina Hoeve at a Glance
🧀 What it is · A free, working cheese farm on the main path at Zaanse Schans, with a ten-minute Gouda-making demonstration, a tasting, and a large shop.
🔬 What you learn · Milk to wheel: rennet sets it, the harp cuts curds from whey, and washing the curds with warm water is what makes Gouda mild, where Cheddar stays sharp.
🏷️ The surprise · Gouda is named after the town where it was traded, not made. First market 1395; first written mention 1184.
🚢 The point · The brine, rind, wax and ageing are all preservation. Edam’s wax coat ruled the world cheese trade from the 14th to 18th centuries.
💡 Tip · Catch the demo before you shop, and buy the cheese even if you’re travelling: waxed and vacuum-packed, it keeps a month unrefrigerated.

A Farm With a Shop Attached

Catharina Hoeve sits on the path between the windmills and the village entrance, behind a wooden cart loaded with old milk churns. The building is black timber with a red tiled roof, a Dutch flag on a pole and a white stable door standing open.

The sign at the gate says Free Entrance. I have written elsewhere about what that actually buys, which is a demonstration, a taste and then a room full of things to purchase. It is smartly done and I did not mind it.

The Demonstration

Our tour guide brought us to the farm and left us to it. The demonstration is run by the farm itself, and afterwards there was time to shop or wander at our own pace. That order matters, and it is the reason I would tell anybody to catch the talk before doing anything else.

The man presenting it stood in front of a wall of yellow wheels racked on pale wooden shelves, with a red iron press beside him and a table of samples at his elbow, and took the room through the sequence from milk to wheel. Ten minutes, no charge, in plain English.

I had eaten cheese my whole life without any idea how it was made. I could not have said what curds were. Standing in that room, watching somebody name each step in order, turned a supermarket product into a process with reasons behind it.

What Is Happening in the Vat

Next door stands the vat, and once the demonstration has explained it, it stops being a big tub and becomes the whole point.

It is a wooden barrel bound in steel, with a stainless rim and a rotating arm carrying a wire harp. Inside, the surface is not milk. It is set: a pale, slightly grainy solid with a faint sheen, which is milk that has been persuaded to stop being liquid.

Rennet does that. Added to warmed and cultured milk, its enzymes link the milk proteins together and the whole vat turns to a soft gel in something like thirty to forty-five minutes. Then the wire harp comes down and cuts the mass into pieces so the liquid can drain away from the solids. Those two things are the whole vocabulary of cheese: the solids are the curds, the liquid running off them is the whey.

The Step That Makes Gouda Taste Like Gouda

Here is the thing I have thought about most since.

After the curds are cut, part of the whey is drained off and replaced with warm water. The step is called washing the curds, and it is not a cleaning operation. It dilutes the lactic acid the bacteria have been producing, which is precisely why Gouda is mild and faintly sweet rather than sharp.

Cheddar skips that step. That is the whole difference. Two cheeses that look broadly similar on a shelf taste nothing alike because of one decision made in a vat about whether to pour some liquid off and top it up with water.

After that the curds go into round moulds lined with cloth and are pressed, then the wheels go into a saturated salt brine for the better part of a day. The brine does three jobs at once. It seasons the cheese all the way through, draws out more moisture, and forms the rind that holds the wheel’s shape while it ages.

The Wall of Photographs

Along one wall are framed photographs, and they are worth more than a passing look.

One shows a cheese loft, rack after rack of pale wheels running back into the dark, with two people moving among them and a low brick salting trough in the foreground. The other shows a woman in an apron at a frame of moulds, with two small children in work clothes standing at the table beside her, hands on the equipment.

For centuries this was family work. Farmers made cheese from the milk of their own cows and carried it to local markets, and the method passed down a household rather than through a school. The children in that photograph are not visiting. They are helping.

Why the Netherlands

The part that genuinely surprised me is that Dutch cheese is named after trade rather than production.

Gouda is not called Gouda because it was made in Gouda. It is called Gouda because it was sold there. The first cheese market in the town was held in 1395, and the first written mention of the cheese goes back to 1184, which makes it one of the oldest cheeses still in production anywhere. Edam takes its name from a town in North Holland in the same way.

The trade grew a whole apparatus around itself. Towns granted weighing rights built weigh houses, and the square in front became the Waagplein, the weighing square. Guild porters carried the wheels on wooden barrows between two men. Alkmaar has been trading cheese on its Waagplein since 1593.

None of that is about flavour. It is about a country with wet grass, a lot of cows, a serious surplus of milk and an unusually good instinct for selling things.

The Shop

The retail half is considerable, and it is arranged by category rather than piled up.

One chilled case holds goat’s cheese: truffle at €17.95, lavender at €16.95, cow cheese with red pesto, and a bank of small orange-waxed rounds behind. Another holds the aged end of the range, extra old cow, goat and sheep, with a Trio Old Cheese offer at €43.95 against a normal price of €52.85, and a shelf of wine above it at €8.95 a bottle. A table near the door carries gift sets, wax-sealed rounds paired with wooden boards and Delft-handled slicers, and a wooden box branded A Gift from Holland.

All of those were April 2026 prices and will have moved since.

I tasted a piece of Gouda. I could not now say whether it was young or aged, which is the honest answer, and it was delicious.

I did not buy any, and I want to explain why, because the reason turns out to be the joke of the whole visit.

Our Cheese Likes to Travel

I was travelling. I had days of trains and a flight ahead of me and no way of keeping anything cold, so I looked at a wall of cheese I had just learned to appreciate and decided it was impractical.

Printed along the shelf edge of the chilled case, twice, in white capitals, is this: our cheese likes to travel, it keeps well without refrigeration, max 1 month.

I photographed that line without reading it.

And the shop is not making it up. Keeping is the entire reason this cheese exists in the form it does. The brine, the rind, the wax, the months of ageing are all preservation, invented for a world without refrigeration. Edam’s wax coat made it so durable that it went into ships’ holds as a matter of course and dominated the world cheese trade from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth. Dutch cheese conquered the planet precisely because it survived the journey.

So the one objection I raised was the one objection six hundred years of Dutch engineering had already answered, on a sign, at eye level, in English.

Bubbly Tips

• Catch the demonstration before you shop. It is free, it takes about ten minutes and it runs through the day. Doing it first turns the shop from a wall of packaging into a wall of things you understand.
• Buy the cheese even if you are travelling. This is the tip I wish somebody had given me. Vacuum-packed and waxed Dutch cheese keeps without refrigeration for around a month, which is longer than most trips.
• Getting there from Amsterdam. Catharina Hoeve stands at Zaanse Schans, about seventeen kilometres by road north of the city and roughly half an hour door to door. The Sprinter from Amsterdam Centraal reaches Zaandijk Zaanse Schans in about seventeen minutes, followed by a fifteen-minute walk along the river. Bus 391 from Centraal takes around forty minutes and stops at the village entrance, which is closer. The farm is a few minutes on foot once you are in the village.
• Ask for young and old side by side. The same cheese at three months and at three years is barely the same food. Tasting them together is the fastest way to work out what you actually like.
• Look at the two framed photographs. They are on the wall near the demonstration area and almost nobody stops at them. The one with the children says more about Dutch cheese than any label in the shop.
• The vat is worth a proper look. Once you know what rennet does, the set surface in that barrel is genuinely interesting rather than just a big tub of something white.
• Prices are per piece, not per kilo, on the small packs. Check the shelf label before assuming, since the cases mix formats and the wedges and the whole rounds are priced differently.
• Free entrance means free. Nobody follows you round, nobody pushes, and leaving without buying is entirely normal. The tasting is not a transaction.
• Combine it with the clog workshop next door. Both are free, both run demonstrations, and together they take about an hour, which is a sensible chunk of a Zaanse Schans visit.
• Go early if you want to hear anything. By mid-afternoon the demonstration room fills to the beams and the back of the crowd catches roughly half of it.

Final Thoughts

I came to Zaanse Schans for windmills and left thinking about preservation.

Everything that makes Dutch cheese what it is, the washing of the curds, the salt bath, the wax, the patient months on a wooden rack, exists because milk goes off and a farm with cows has more of it than a family can drink. Solve that problem well enough and a farm does not merely feed itself through the winter. It ends up naming a cheese after its market town, building a weigh house on the square, and selling to the world for six centuries.

I still think about that sign on the fridge. I had spent forty minutes being told, in detail, that this is food designed to survive a journey, and then declined to buy any on the grounds that I had a journey ahead of me.

Until next time!

The post Cheese That Was Built to Travel: Catharina Hoeve at Zaanse Schans appeared first on Bubbly Living.

The tour I booked bundled Keukenhof with an afternoon here, which is why I had half a day in the tulip gardens instead of the full one I would have chosen. Had I known how much there was in the pavilions alone, I would have booked the two separately and given each its own day.

That is the honest frame for this post, and it is not a complaint about Zaanse Schans. The village is lovely. It is a complaint about a bus timetable deciding how long I got to look at things.

Zaanse Schans at a Glance
🌬️ What it is · A free-to-enter riverside village of windmills and green timber houses near Zaandam, most of it relocated here between 1961 and 1974 to save it.
💶 Cost · Walking in is free; windmills and museums charge separately (a mill is roughly €7.50). The clog and cheese demonstrations are free.
🚆 Getting there · A Sprinter from Amsterdam Centraal is ~17 minutes to Zaandijk Zaanse Schans, then a 15-minute walk; bus 391 (~40 min) stops at the entrance.
🕒 Time needed · About three hours for the village, demos and a proper meal; add an hour to climb a mill.
💡 Tip · Don’t bundle it with Keukenhof in one day, and eat the apple-and-bacon pancake.

A Village That Was Carried Here

Almost nothing at Zaanse Schans was originally at Zaanse Schans.

After the war, the Zaan region’s timber buildings were disappearing fast. The architect Jaap Schipper drew up a plan to save them, and between 1961 and 1974 houses, barns and windmills were dismantled across the region and moved to this stretch of riverbank on low-loader trailers and barges. The green wooden houses along the dykes, the black barns, most of the mills: all brought in. The site was formally opened in 1972 by Queen Juliana.

The rescue effort was older than that, though. As early as 1925 a painter and teacher named Frans Mars had founded an association to stop the mills coming down, at a point when they were being demolished faster than anyone could record them. That association still looks after thirteen of them.

There is also a reason none of these houses is older than the late sixteenth century. Spanish troops burned the Zaan villages as they withdrew from North Holland, so everything standing here dates from the late sixteenth century or after.

It is free to walk into. There is no ticket for the village itself, and no gate. The windmills and the museums charge separately, so a visitor decides how much of it to pay for.

Windmills, From the Outside

The Zaan was one of the first industrialised regions in Europe, and at its height it carried something like six hundred working windmills, grinding pigment, sawing timber, pressing oil and milling spice. What survives here is a fraction of that, standing in a row along the water.

The whole thing turned on one invention. In the 1590s a mill owner from nearby Uitgeest, Cornelis Corneliszoon, fitted a crankshaft to a windmill so that the circular turn of the sails became the up and down stroke of a saw. Cutting a log into planks became something like thirty times faster than doing it by hand.

What followed was timber. The Zaan became one of the largest timber ports in the world and then the centre of commercial shipbuilding in Europe, with twenty-six yards launching somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty ships a year. The planks in the hulls of the ships in the Rijksmuseum’s maritime room were very likely cut by mills standing where these ones stand. Peter the Great came here in 1697 to learn the trade himself.

Of the hundred or so wind-powered sawmills that once worked this river, exactly one survives, and it is a reconstruction. I did not go inside any of them. Several are working mills that can be entered for a fee, and if I had been given a full day I would have climbed one. With three hours I chose to walk the length of the site instead, and I would make the same choice again. From the path they hold up perfectly well: the sails turning properly, the tarred timber, the green paint, the reed beds running down to the water.

Clogs

The wooden shoe workshop is free to walk into, and it does two things at once. One half is a shop. The other is a museum case and a working demonstration.

The case is the better half. Behind glass are carved clogs of a kind nobody ever put on to muck out a barn: whole uppers cut into star and rosette patterns, some pale, some almost black with age, alongside a pair of white bridal slippers embroidered with flowers.

Then a man stepped up to a machine and made one. The block goes in, one arm traces a finished shoe, the other cuts, and shavings come off in handfuls. It is loud and it is fast and it is not remotely quaint.

I had seen wooden clogs plenty of times before this and always thought they looked odd. Clumsy, faintly comic, the sort of thing that exists to be sold in an airport. Half an hour in that workshop rearranged all of it.

Clogs were working footwear, cheap and waterproof and replaceable, worn by farmers and labourers who could not afford leather. They are warm in winter and cool in summer, the wood absorbs sweat, and they keep water out entirely, which matters a great deal in a country this wet. They also protect the foot. Traditional all-wooden clogs are accredited safety shoes carrying the CE mark, tested against heavy pressure and against sharp objects underfoot, and in a serious accident the wood cracks and releases the foot where a steel toecap dents and keeps pressing on it.

So the thing I had filed as a souvenir turns out to be a piece of protective equipment with about eight centuries behind it. The carved pairs in the case were the exception rather than the rule: objects made for weddings, for church, for showing off. The workshop’s own label notes that carving them by hand is now a trade rarely practised at all. They are still sold by the shelf-full to people like me, and they are also still worn in Dutch farming, which is the part I had never once considered.

Cheese

Next door is Catharina Hoeve, a working cheese farm, and the sign at the gate reads Free Entrance. Let us be honest about how that works. Nobody charges at the door, the demonstration is genuinely good, and at the end of it I was standing in a shop. The two best half-hours of my afternoon, this and the clog workshop, cost me nothing, and both of them finished in a room full of things to buy. It is smartly done. I did not mind it in the least.

Inside is a room lined floor to ceiling with wheels of cheese on open wooden racks, a black and white tiled floor, a wooden press with red iron arms, and a large sepia photograph of a cheese loft covering one wall. There was a demonstration, there were tastings, and there was no obligation to buy anything.

I will admit something here. I did not know the Netherlands was a cheese country. Windmills, tulips, canals, painters, yes. Cheese had never once entered my picture of the place, and I had walked past Gouda and Edam on supermarket shelves my whole life without joining them to a map.

I tasted a piece. It was delicious, and I stood there mildly embarrassed about the gap in my education.

The Pancake

The pancakes are as good as everybody says. I ate mine at one of the village’s own restaurants rather than at a food stall, and it was worth sitting down for. Mine came thin and wide, the full width of the plate, laid with rings of apple caramelised into the batter and strips of bacon across the middle, dusted with sugar.

It is a proper meal rather than a snack, and it is the one thing I would tell somebody not to skip.

I Was Expecting Tulips

Here is the honest part, and it says more about me than about the village.

I arrived half looking for flowers. I had come straight from Keukenhof, the bus had spent the morning surrounded by bulb fields, and some part of my head had filed the whole day under tulips.

Zaanse Schans is not that. It is a village about wind, timber, pigment, oil and cheese, and the closest thing to a flower on the site is painted on the side of a giant yellow clog by the path. That is not a failing. It was an expectation I brought with me and hung on a place that had never advertised it.

People Live Here

The thing that stayed with me is on the far bank of the river.

Looking across the water from the village, there is a row of green timber houses with curtains in the windows, garden furniture on the decking, a boat moored at the bottom of a garden and scaffolding up one side of a house being repaired. Ordinary life, directly opposite a site that several million people walk through every year.

Bubbly Tips

• Book Keukenhof and Zaanse Schans separately. This is the whole point of this post. Bundled as a single day they squeeze each other, and the garden is the one that loses. Give Keukenhof a full day of its own and come here on another.
• Getting there from Amsterdam is easy, and cheap. I went on a guided bus tour, but Zaanse Schans is simple to reach independently. A Sprinter from Amsterdam Centraal takes about seventeen minutes to Zaandijk Zaanse Schans, then a walk of roughly fifteen minutes along the river into the village. Bus 391 from Centraal takes about forty minutes and stops at the entrance beside the Zaans Museum, which suits anyone with a pushchair or heavy bags. Fares shift each year, so check the NS app or the 9292 planner.
• Three hours is enough for the village, but not for the mills. Walking the site, doing the clog and cheese demonstrations and eating properly took me almost exactly three hours without going inside a windmill. Add an hour if you want to climb one.
• Both demonstrations are free. The wooden shoe workshop and the cheese farm cost nothing to enter and neither pushes a sale. If you enjoy them and buy nothing, leaving something behind is a decent gesture.
• Do not come expecting tulips. Zaanse Schans is a windmill and craft village. In spring the surrounding fields may have colour, but the site itself is timber and water and grass.
• Get to the far end of the path. Most tour groups cluster around the first mills and the shops. The stretch beyond, towards the open meadow and De Haal, empties out considerably.
• Look across the river, not just along it. The far bank is where the ordinary houses are, and it is the best reminder that this is a place people actually live rather than a set.
• Bring your own lunch if you would rather. There is no gate and no ticket, so a picnic on the grass by the water is entirely allowed and considerably cheaper.
• Eat the pancake anyway. Even having said that, the pancake is worth the money and worth the queue.
• Go on a weekday if the choice is yours. The tour buses arrive in waves. A weekday afternoon at the far end of the site was noticeably calmer than the area by the entrance.

Final Thoughts

Zaanse Schans was a good afternoon. The mills are genuinely impressive, the two demonstrations are free and unhurried, the pancake was excellent and the walk along the water is exactly what people picture when they picture the Netherlands.

What I would change is not the place but the shape of the day. I gave three hours to a village I enjoyed and half a day to a garden I loved, and the split was decided by a bus timetable rather than by me. If a trip has both on the list, book them apart. Zaanse Schans is not diminished by being seen properly, and Keukenhof deserves not to be seen in a hurry.

Until next time!

The post Zaanse Schans, and the Trouble With Bundled Day Trips appeared first on Bubbly Living.

So on the last evening of April we went to Café Vertigo. This is not the post I expected to write about it.

Café Vertigo at a Glance
🏛️ The setting · A terrace beneath the 1881 Vondelpark Pavilion, looking over the pond where the Tulp Festival floats tulip beds each April. Genuinely lovely.
☕ What works · The bar. Coffee, beer and fried snacks (order the spring rolls) arrive fast and are perfectly good.
🍽️ What doesn’t · The kitchen. A burger never arrived after an hour-plus; the shrimp “dish” was a mayo salad in an ice-cream glass. No apology.
🪧 The tell · A “we’re hiring, apply now” board stands on the terrace, three metres from tables being told the waitress is too busy.
💡 Tip · Go for a drink in the evening light, eat elsewhere, and see the tulip rafts free from the pond bank.

The Building Is Not the Problem

Let me be fair about the setting, because the setting is genuinely lovely and it is the reason people keep coming.

The Vondelpark Pavilion went up between 1879 and 1881 to a design by the architect Willem Hamer, in an Italian Renaissance style that looks imported from a spa town: domed turrets, arched windows, fluted half columns, a broad terrace above the water. Hamer also designed the restaurant hall added on the east side in 1890. Café Vertigo takes its name from the Hitchcock film and has been part of the pavilion since the late 1980s. It was redesigned in 2025 by the studio Modijefsky, working with the building’s past lives as a film museum and, before that, a nightclub.

On a clear evening in late April the terrace is full, the parasols are out, the string lights are up and the bicycles are stacked six deep along the path. It looks exactly like the place to spend an evening. That is the trap.

What Arrived

A hostess seated us and the order was taken. Then the small things came out steadily, one after another: a flat white, then nuts and crisps and olives, then spring rolls, then a dish described to us as shrimp cocktail, which arrived as a small shrimp salad in a stemmed glass with two triangles of toast.

All of that reached the table inside about half an hour. Hold on to that, because it matters later.

None of that was bad. The coffee was fine.

The nuts and crisps were nuts and crisps. Nothing to complain about and nothing much to remember either.

The spring rolls came out hot and crisp with a cup of sweet chilli sauce, and were the best thing that reached the table all evening.

The shrimp cocktail was the first real disappointment, and a mild one. It was delivered as a mayonnaise-bound salad under a thick layer of chives, in a glass more usually used for ice cream. It was not unpleasant. It was not what I had pictured, and I did not want to finish it.

What Did Not

We had also ordered a burger. It never came.

We waited more than an hour for it. When we asked, the waitress told us she was too busy. She came back about fifteen minutes later and we told her again that we had ordered a burger. There was no apology and no explanation. So I cancelled it, we paid for what had actually been delivered, and we left.

I want to be precise about why that ended the evening rather than merely annoying me. Kitchens get behind. Tickets get lost. A busy terrace on a warm evening at the end of April is a hard shift and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. What decided it was that nobody treated it as a problem. Not the waitress, not anyone else. We cancelled a main course after more than an hour and it landed as though we had asked for the bill.

The Sign On The Terrace

Here is the detail I keep returning to, and it is in my own photograph of the terrace.

Propped at the edge of the seating, in the house colours, is a recruitment board. Bij ons werken, soliciteer direct. Work with us, apply now, with a QR code.

So the restaurant knows. Somebody put that board out because there are not enough staff, and it is standing three metres from tables where people are being told the waitress is too busy. I do not blame the woman who served us for a staffing level she did not set. I do blame an operation that keeps seating a full terrace it cannot serve, and advertises the fact while doing it.

I Had Been Warned

The irritating part is that I knew. Before we went, more than one person had told me the same thing about Vertigo: lovely spot, go for a drink, do not eat there.

I went anyway, because the pavilion is beautiful and the park in tulip season is beautiful and I wanted the version of the evening I had imagined from the bank of the pond. A view is a powerful argument. It is not, as it turns out, an argument about food.

Bubbly Tips

• Go for a drink, not a meal. This is the advice I was given and ignored, and it is the advice I would now pass on. The coffee and the beer arrived quickly and were perfectly good. The kitchen is where it fell apart.
• Ask how long the kitchen is running before you order a main. On a full terrace this is a fair question and the answer tells you whether to stay or move on.
• Order snacks rather than plates. Everything that came out of the bar or needed only a fryer arrived within twenty minutes. The one item that needed cooking to order never appeared at all.
• Ask about the upper balcony when you book, not when you arrive. I asked to sit up there and was told it was closed for a private event, so we were put outside instead. The terrace is lovely, but it is worth knowing which parts of the building are actually available before you turn up hoping for one of them.
• Do not pay for what did not arrive. Cancelling an item that never came is entirely reasonable, and paying only for what was delivered is the correct outcome, not a favour.
• See the tulip rafts from the bank, not the table. The floating beds sit out on the pond through April and the best views are from the paths around the water, which cost nothing and require no reservation.
• Eat elsewhere and come back for the terrace. There are better kitchens within a short walk in the museum quarter. Come here afterwards for a drink in the last of the light, which is what the place is actually good at.
• Go earlier than we did if you want a table at all. By seven on a warm evening the terrace was full and the queue at the steps was building.
• Look up at the facade before you sit down. The group crowning the centre of the building is the Amsterdam city shield held between Pomona, goddess of orchard fruit, and Flora, goddess of spring and flowers. It takes ten seconds from the path, and almost everyone photographs the parasols instead.

Final Thoughts

I do not enjoy writing this. Most of what appears on this blog is enthusiasm, because most of what I do on a trip is worth being enthusiastic about, and a restaurant having a bad night is not usually a story.

This was not a bad night. This was an evening in which a beautiful building, a famous park and a full terrace were all working exactly as intended, and the only thing that failed was the part where somebody brings the food that was ordered, and speaks to the table when they cannot. A view cannot carry that. Nothing can.

Go and stand by the pond in April and look at the tulips on the water. Have a drink on the terrace afterwards if the light is good. Then eat somewhere else.

Until next time!

The post Café Vertigo, Amsterdam: Go for the Terrace, Not the Food appeared first on Bubbly Living.

For years they were just a nice thing that arrived with a drink. Then I went to Lisbon and fell for the azulejos, and then I went to Amsterdam and found a museum case full of Chinese porcelain, and somewhere in between I realised that all three were the same story. This post is that story, and it starts in the wrong country.

Blue and White at a Glance
🔵 One pattern, many hands · Blue-on-white began in 9th-century Iraq (Basra), imitating Chinese white ware, and travelled for 900 years before a Dutch ship carried any of it.
🇨🇳 Chinese and Islamic at once · Mass-produced blue-and-white porcelain is Chinese (Jingdezhen), but only because cobalt came from Persia; the Chinese name for it means “Islamic blue.”
🇳🇱 Delft is an imitation · When Chinese imports stopped after the Ming fell, Delft potters faked porcelain in tin-glazed earthenware. It never was porcelain.
🇵🇹 Lisbon copied Delft · Portugal’s azulejos turned blue-and-white under Dutch influence, and “azulejo” comes from Arabic for “polished stone,” not from azul.
💡 Tip · Read the “medium” line on museum labels: porcelain and tin-glazed earthenware look identical and are the whole story.

It Started in Lisbon

In Alfama, on the terrace at the Miradouro de Santa Luzia, the side wall of the church carries two panels of blue and white tiles. The one I stood in front of shows the Terreiro do Paço, the great riverside square now called the Praça do Comércio, as it looked before the earthquake of 1755 flattened it. Carriages, market stalls, a bullfight in progress, and a city that no longer exists.

I assumed, as most people do, that azulejo must come from azul, the Portuguese word for blue. It does not. The word comes from Arabic, al-zulayj, meaning a small polished stone, and it arrived in Iberia with the Moors centuries before anyone painted a picture on a tile. The first azulejos were cut geometric mosaic, in green and yellow and white as much as blue.

So the name is Arabic, the technique is North African, and the blue came later from somewhere else entirely. That was the first thing I got wrong.

A Case Full of China

Months later I was standing in front of a display case at the Rijksmuseum holding several hundred pieces of blue and white, and none of it was Dutch.

Tall cylindrical vases on the top shelf. Bowls, cups, dishes and plates below, some whole and some broken clean in half. The pieces are Chinese, made mostly between 1600 and 1650, and they came to Amsterdam in the holds of ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company, known by its Dutch initials as the VOC.

This is where the assumption I had carried since Lisbon started to come apart. The Dutch did not invent this. They imported it by the shipload.

Pepper From a Wreck

The strangest object in the case is a lump of encrusted iron with a small white cup fused to it, lying beside a neat square of what looks like gravel.

The gravel is peppercorns. They came off the Witte Leeuw, a Dutch East India Company ship that sank in 1613 carrying porcelain and pepper. The wreck was found and salvaged in 1976, and the material in this case was given to the museum the following year.

Pepper does not normally survive a shipwreck. It floats free and rots. Only occasionally does a load get buried in the seabed fast enough to be preserved, and then it comes up looking, as the label puts it, as though it had come from the market yesterday. The white wine cup did not fare as well. It fused itself to a piece of iron among the shells and had to be lifted with it.

The two dishes further down stopped me for a different reason. They show a bare-bellied monk surrounded by swirling leaves, and the label explains that they were made for Japanese buyers, not Dutch ones. The smaller plates in the same case, with a horse and a grasshopper, were intended for European customers.

The same kilns, the same blue, the same year, painted differently depending on who was expected to buy. That is not an artistic tradition. That is a business with a catalogue.

Where the Blue Actually Came From

Here is the part I had entirely wrong, and it answers the question I had been carrying around since Lisbon.

Blue and white porcelain as a mass-produced object is Chinese. It comes from the kilns at Jingdezhen and became widespread in the fourteenth century, under the Yuan dynasty. So far, so expected.

But the Chinese could only make it because cobalt was being imported from Persia. The pigment was so associated with its source that the Chinese name for it translates as Islamic blue. And the decorative idea of painting in blue on a white ground is older still. In the ninth century, potters in Basra, in what is now Iraq, were trying to imitate white Chinese stoneware arriving by sea. They could not make porcelain, so they covered their earthenware in an opaque white tin glaze and painted it in blue.

Which means the answer to my question is all three of the things I had heard. It is Chinese. It is also, in its origins, Islamic. And it travelled by trade route in both directions for six hundred years before a Dutch ship ever carried any of it.

When the Supply Failed

Now the Dutch part, and it is not a story about taste. It is a story about a broken supply chain.

The Dutch East India Company imported Chinese porcelain steadily until the middle of the seventeenth century. Then the Ming dynasty fell, China went into a long civil war, and after about 1647 the shipments stopped. European households still wanted blue and white. Nobody in Europe could make porcelain, because nobody had worked out that it needed kaolin.

So the potters of Delft did exactly what Basra had done eight centuries earlier. They took ordinary clay, coated it in opaque white tin glaze, and painted it in blue. Seventeen new factories opened in Delft between 1653 and 1662.

This is why the labels in this room say tin-glazed earthenware rather than porcelain. Delftware is not porcelain and never was. It is a very good imitation of something the people making it could not reproduce.

Copies of Copies

What happened next is the part I find genuinely funny.

Having learned to imitate Chinese decoration, Delft painters started applying the same blue to entirely Dutch subjects. On one wall hangs a group of tin-glazed plaques painted like framed pictures: wooded landscapes, a cavalry encampment with tents and flags, a river with a bridge, two portraits of bearded men in dark robes, a Last Supper. They are copied from Dutch and Flemish prints, in a colour scheme borrowed from China, using a technique borrowed from the Islamic world.

The museum’s own label for one of the jars calls this chinoiserie, and defines it as a free European interpretation of Chinese motifs. It is an interpretation of an interpretation.

By the table of Delft tableware at the far end, the Chinese source has almost disappeared. A jug, plates painted with horsemen and hunting scenes, a teapot, a lidded jar, and one large dish still carrying the panelled border that came straight off a Chinese original. Dutch subjects, Dutch shapes, Chinese layout, Persian pigment.

Back to Lisbon

Which brings the whole thing round, because Portugal did the same, and slightly later.

Portuguese azulejos were polychrome until the 1620s or thereabouts. The shift to blue and white followed the arrival of Chinese porcelain and then, decisively, of Dutch tiles. Portugal imported Delft blue and white in such quantity that the government eventually banned the imports to protect its own workshops.

So the tiles I fell in love with in Alfama are blue because of Delft, and Delft is blue because of China, and China is blue because of Persia, and the idea of blue on white tin glaze started in Iraq. The wall at Santa Luzia and the case at the Rijksmuseum are two points on the same line.

And the pattern has not stopped working. In a shop window in Príncipe Real I found soap boxes, hand cream and candle tins in the same blue on the same white, sold as something recognisably Portuguese. In Belém’s famous pastry shop there is a framed eighteenth-century panel on the wall showing the monastery and the riverfront, with people arriving by boat.

Nobody buying a candle in that window is thinking about Basra. That is rather the point. The pattern outlived every trade route that carried it.

Bubbly Tips

• Read the medium line on every label. Porcelain and tin-glazed earthenware look almost identical behind glass and are completely different things. The label tells you which you are looking at, and the difference is the whole history.
• Look for the broken pieces, not the perfect ones. The half plates and shards in the Chinese case came off a wreck. They carry more information than the intact vases beside them.
• Find the peppercorns. They are easy to walk past because they look like gravel on a white card. They are a cargo from 1613.
• Check who a piece was made for. Several labels in this room specify Japanese buyers or European ones. Once you start looking for it, the export catalogue becomes visible.
• Give yourself two rooms, not one. The Chinese porcelain and the Delft earthenware sit in different parts of the museum. Seeing them in that order is what makes the argument land.
• In Lisbon, go to Santa Luzia early. The terrace is small and gets crowded, and the panels are in a shaded alcove beside the church wall that most people walk straight past on the way to the railing.
• Photograph tiles on an overcast day. Direct sun blows out the white glaze and kills the blue. The flat light I had in Alfama in December was better for it than a bright afternoon would have been.
• Look at packaging as well as monuments. Some of the best blue and white in Lisbon is in shop windows, and it tells you the pattern is still alive rather than preserved.

If you fly KLM in Business Class, keep the house. It is a scale model of a real Dutch building, there is a new one every 7 October, and it is the cheapest piece of this entire story you will ever

Final Thoughts

I started this thinking blue and white was Dutch, then decided it was Chinese, then heard it might be Moorish, and assumed one of those had to be right. All three are, and the order matters: Iraqi potters imitating Chinese white ware, Persian cobalt reaching Chinese kilns, Chinese porcelain reaching Amsterdam, Dutch potters imitating it when the ships stopped coming, and Portuguese workshops imitating the Dutch.

Every stage of that is somebody copying something they admired and could not quite make. The Basra potters could not make porcelain. The Delft potters could not make porcelain. Neither failure produced anything less beautiful, and the thing I keep on a shelf at home is the end of that line: a Dutch house, in a Chinese colour scheme, mixed from a Persian pigment, handed to me on an airplane.

Until next time!

The post Blue and White: What Lisbon and Amsterdam Have in Common appeared first on Bubbly Living.

That is the argument for reading labels, and it is why I want to write about this pavilion separately from the gardens outside. Out there, flowers are planted in the ground in drifts and the effect is pure colour. In here they are staged one at a time on plinths, each with a card naming what it is and who grew it. It changes what a visitor does. Outside I looked. Inside I read.

The Willem-Alexander Pavilion at a Glance
🏛️ What it is · Keukenhof’s largest indoor space, built for exhibition rather than growing: plants staged one at a time on plinths, each with a naming card.
🌺 The star show · Massed “amaryllis” in colours no Christmas box contains, plus hydrangeas, hostas, gerberas and a nursery-style narcissi display.
🏷️ The twist · Those “amaryllis” are Hippeastrum, not amaryllis, and not lilies. The one true amaryllis is nicknamed a lily. A 1987 congress settled it.
🪑 The practical case · Glazed, sheltered and full of seating, it’s the sensible midday break on a long day at Keukenhof.
💡 Tip · Read the cards; check which show is running (the world’s largest lily show is only here in the final days).

A Building For Showing, Not Growing

The Willem-Alexander Pavilion is the largest indoor space at Keukenhof, and it is built for exhibition rather than cultivation. A high glazed roof, white tension struts, shade blinds rolled across the glass, and timber screens dividing the floor into rooms. Some sections have curved bamboo walls. Others open onto a pool with low water jets.

The plants sit on grey blocks at knee and waist height, staged like objects. Each one carries a card with the Keukenhof tulip logo, the cultivar name, the grower’s name and website, and a number in the corner. The one I stopped at read Amaryllis ‘Bentley’, grown by Floralia, number 114.

Across the eight weeks of the season the displays are swapped out, so the building never shows the same thing twice for long. In the final days it holds what is billed as the world’s largest lily show, which is not what I saw and is a good reason to come back at a different point in the season.

Amaryllis, Or Not

Here is what the label taught me, and it turns out to be a two-hundred-year argument.

The flowers on those plinths are not lilies. They are what everybody, including Keukenhof, calls amaryllis. But botanically they are not amaryllis either. They belong to the genus Hippeastrum.

The confusion goes back to Linnaeus, who created the name Amaryllis belladonna in 1753 at a point when South African and South American plants were being filed in the same genus. Once botanists separated them, the question became which continent Linnaeus had actually been describing. The dispute ran from the 1930s onwards, with botanists on both sides of the Atlantic, and was only settled at the fourteenth International Botanical Congress in 1987.

The ruling went one way and the shops went the other. True Amaryllis turned out to be a single South African species, Amaryllis belladonna. Everything sold at Christmas in a box, and everything on these plinths, is Hippeastrum from the Americas. The trade never changed the name.

And the joke lands properly at the end. The one plant genuinely entitled to be called Amaryllis goes by the common name belladonna lily, and is also nicknamed the naked lady. So the true amaryllis is called a lily, the false amaryllis keeps the name amaryllis, and neither of them is a lily at all.

I had called them lilies. I was wrong three ways at once, which is more than most people manage before eleven in the morning.

The Colour Range

This is what I had come for without knowing it. Not one red trumpet on a windowsill in December, but forty of them at once, in colours nobody puts in a Christmas box.

A deep red with a cream star running out from the throat and fine white feathering down the petals. A white one with a thread of dark red drawn round every edge, so precise it looks ruled. A coral that shades to salmon at the tips with a green eye at the centre. Pink and white stripes. A double form so packed with petals it stops looking like the same plant.

Seen close, the petals are not flat. They are ribbed and slightly crumpled, like fabric that has been folded and opened out, and the stamens curve up and out with pollen already loose on them.

The coral one was the hardest to photograph and the one I kept returning to, because the colour shifts along each petal and no two flowers on the same stem were quite the same shade.

The Hydrangeas

Then I turned a corner and found something from home.

A single low planter, dressed with coir over the root balls, holding hydrangeas in pink, lilac, blue and a pale green that had not finished opening. Big mophead flowers, some heads carrying two colours at once.

We have these in Canada. Same plant, same colours, in front gardens and along driveways and in every second garden centre in spring. I had crossed an ocean and walked past seven million bulbs to be stopped by the thing that grows at home. That is not a complaint. There is something steadying about recognising a plant in a foreign country, and it is the only display in this building I could have identified without reading the card.

The Parts Nobody Photographs

Two displays in this pavilion had no crowd at all, and both were better than their audience suggested.

The first was foliage. Ranks of hostas in black pots on low blocks, running along a bamboo screen: broad ribbed leaves in blue green, in lime, and in cream and green variegations, arranged so the leaf shapes played against each other. No flowers involved. It was the calmest corner of the building.

The second was a bed of gerberas in red and yellow, every flower a two-tone daisy with a yellow disc at the centre, packed so tightly the leaves barely showed. It sat in a plain planter on wood chip, and people walked straight past it towards the amaryllis.

The Other End of the Building

The far end of the pavilion works differently again. Timber pergolas overhead, long wooden trays of white narcissi at ground level, orange and yellow tulips in low crates, white daisies in blocks, and a climbing frame of red pelargoniums trained into a column.

This section is arranged more like a nursery than a gallery, with the trays sitting on pallets, and it is where the pavilion stops being a show and starts looking like the industry that supplies it.

Somewhere to Sit

The honest reason to come in here is that it is a building with a roof, and Keukenhof is a long day on the feet.

I had walked the gardens, and I had the Juliana Pavilion still ahead of me. This was the middle of the day and the middle of the visit, out of the wind, with somewhere to stand still and something to read. I left knowing the name of a flower I had been getting wrong for years.

Bubbly Tips

• Read the cards. Every staged plant carries one, with the cultivar name, the grower and a number. They take four seconds and they are the difference between looking at a nice red flower and knowing what it is.
• Go inside when the weather turns. The pavilion is glazed and sheltered, so it is the obvious move if it starts raining or the wind comes up off the fields.
• Check which show is running before you travel. The displays change across the eight-week season. The world’s largest lily show only occupies this pavilion in the final days, so an April visit and a May visit give you almost entirely different buildings.
• Use it as your midpoint. It sits well between the gardens and the other pavilions, and it is the sensible place to break a long day rather than pushing on to the exit.
• Photograph the close-ups indoors, not the wides. The roof blinds throw stripes across every wide shot. Move in on individual flowers and the diffused light through the glass is as good as any studio.
• Do not skip the foliage. The hosta display had no queue and no crowd, and it is the one place in the building where you can actually see what you are looking at without waiting.
• Look for the pallets at the far end. The trays on wooden pallets show how the plants actually arrive, which is a more interesting thing to notice than another perfect display.
• Bring your reading glasses if you need them. The cards are printed small and set low on the plinths, and I watched more than one person give up on them.
• Keukenhof is not in Amsterdam, and there is no station. The park sits at Lisse, roughly 35 kilometres south-west of the city, and the town has no railway station at all. The direct option is bus 852 from Europaplein, beside Amsterdam RAI, which runs non-stop and takes about 35 minutes. Metro line 52 gets you to Europaplein from Amsterdam Centraal. The Schiphol connection was reorganised for the 2026 season, so check that leg on the official site rather than relying on an older bus number.
• Allow forty minutes. Twenty gets you through. Forty lets you read, sit and go back to the ones you liked.

Final Thoughts

I came to Keukenhof for the fields and the drifts of tulips, and the thing I actually took away was a correction. The flowers I had been calling lilies for most of my adult life are amaryllis, and the flowers called amaryllis are not amaryllis either, and the only true amaryllis is a South African bulb that everyone calls a lily anyway.

None of that would have happened outside. Out in the gardens the planting is designed to overwhelm, and it does. In here the plants are set apart, one at a time, each with its name on a card at eye level, and the building quietly invites a visitor to check what they think they know. Not everything is a lily. I needed a small white label in a Dutch greenhouse to find that out.

Until next time!

The post Not Everything Is a Lily: Keukenhof’s Willem-Alexander Pavilion appeared first on Bubbly Living.

I had a very good time anyway. These are the rooms at the end, after the copper kettles and the history and the bottling line. They are dark, loud, covered in branding, and full of things to look at and play with. Nobody is being taught anything here. It is the part of the tour designed to send visitors out cheerful, and it works.

The Heineken Experience Final Rooms at a Glance
🏎️ The Verstappen case · A lit case with Max Verstappen’s 2024 Red Bull race suit, helmet and a signed cap. The most photographed object in the finale.
🏆 F1 memorabilia · Grand Prix posters, two used Pirelli tyres, and green trophies, the oldest from Monza 2016, Heineken’s first title-sponsored race.
⚽ A foosball pitch · A room dressed as a floodlit stadium, plus a branded dugout with real seats to rest tired legs.
🚫 The 0.0 argument · A green “When You Drive, Never Drink” wall that reveals the whole finale as one alcohol-free sponsorship case.
💡 Tip · Budget half an hour after the historic rooms; take the free-drink token even if you don’t drink (the 0.0 pour counts).

The Case

The first thing in the room is a lit glass case with a racing suit hanging in it.

It belongs to Max Verstappen, and the label dates it to his 2024 season with Oracle Red Bull Racing. Beside it hangs his 2024 driver helmet, red and blue and white with a lion on the crown, and below that a signed cap. The case is edged in green light, with MV and the number 1 across the top, and a Heineken 0.0 logo in the corner.

Verstappen is Dutch, and the phrase I would use is the pride and joy of the nation. He won four consecutive world championships between 2021 and 2024, the first Dutch driver ever to take the title. The case is the single most photographed object in these rooms and I understood why while I was queueing to photograph it.

Posters, and Two Tyres on the Floor

Behind the case, a wall carries Grand Prix posters, one for each race Heineken has put its name to. Las Vegas. Canada, with five red maple leaves. Australia in yellow. China in red and gold. Portugal at Portimão. Italy. Mexico. Beside several of them run the years, stacked in a column: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.

On the floor, two Formula 1 tyres sit at angles, Pirelli in white on the sidewalls, silver rims, and a yellow 0.0 sticker on each hub. They are much wider than they look on television and much lower, and the rubber is scuffed grey rather than glossy black.

The Trophy Case

Round the corner is a glass cabinet holding four green trophies, tall and twisted like flames, with a white one behind them signed by Verstappen.

The labels beneath give the races. First place, Monza, 2016. First place, Monza, 2019. Second place, São Paulo, 2019. And a fourth, marked as an artist edition, also from São Paulo in 2019, etched with drawings down its length rather than polished plain.

The 2016 Monza trophy is the one worth pausing at, and I did not know why until afterwards. Heineken announced its Formula 1 partnership that year, and Monza in September 2016 was the first Grand Prix it title-sponsored. The oldest trophy in the case is from the first race the company put its name on.

The Wall That Explains the Whole Thing

Then comes a green wall, and it is the moment the room stops being memorabilia and starts being an argument.

It is printed with two things, over and over. Heineken 0.0, the alcohol-free version. And a red circle with a bottle and a steering wheel struck through, reading “When You Drive, Never Drink”. A Formula 1 logo and a Heineken 0.0 logo sit together at the centre. In front of it stands a podium, three low green cylinders numbered one, two and three, and beyond that a racing simulator with people queueing at it.

A brewer sponsoring motorsport has an obvious problem, and this wall is the answer to it. The campaign launched in September 2016, at the same moment as the Formula 1 partnership, and the product that carries it is the one with nothing in it. The 0.0 branding on the tyres, on the case, on the wall, is not decoration. It is the entire licence to be there.

The Football Room

The next room is a football pitch, or a very good impression of one. Artificial turf underfoot, walls printed with stands full of blurred spectators, and advertising hoardings running round the edge with the red star on them.

A foosball table stands in the middle. I did not play. I watched two people play instead, one in a red cap, and they were laughing at each other in the way that people do when neither of them is any good and both of them have decided to commit anyway. It was the most relaxed thing I saw all afternoon.

Along one side sits a dugout with real seats, each headrest branded, and a man was sitting in it on his own, watching the room the way a substitute watches a match. There is a screen and a small game at the far end, and an exit sign past that.

The Bar, and the Token

The tour ends underground, at the Best ‘Dam Bar, and this is where the token comes in.

The VIP tour gives one token per person for a free drink. Mine posed a small problem, since I do not drink beer. I also do not like waste. So I handed over the token, took the alcohol-free one, and had a few sips of it standing at a bar under a ceiling of exposed pipes, surrounded by people who had clearly enjoyed their afternoon.

The room is low and dark and green, with bottles ranked in rows along one wall and a living wall of plants behind the taps. A stand near the entrance is headed Glass Collector, asking anyone who has finished to leave their glass there, with empty crates stacked beneath it to take them. Staff in green were working steadily. Nobody was in a hurry to leave.

Bubbly Tips

• Leave time for these rooms. People treat them as the walk to the exit. Budget half an hour after the historic sections or you will find yourself hurrying past the best interactive parts of the building.
• Take the token even if you do not drink. The alcohol-free option is available and staff will pour it without comment. There is no rule that says the free drink has to be the alcoholic one.
• Photograph the Verstappen case from the side. Straight on, the glass throws back the green light strips and the red wall behind you. Standing at an angle gets you the suit and the helmet without the reflection.
• Look at the years next to the posters. They tell you which Grands Prix Heineken has title-sponsored and for how long, which is more informative than the posters themselves.
• Read the trophy labels. The oldest one is from Monza in 2016 and marks the first race the company sponsored under its own name. Without the label it is just a green trophy among green trophies.
• The foosball table gets busy. If you want a game rather than a photograph, go through to the football room before the group behind you catches up.
• Sit in the dugout. It is real seating, it is comfortable, and after two hours of standing on concrete it is the most welcome object in the building.
• The bar has limited seating. It is designed for standing, so if you want to sit down with your drink, the rooftop is the better bet if your ticket includes it.
• Go on a weekday if you can. These rooms depend on other people enjoying themselves to work at all, but a full tour group in the racing room turns it into a queue.

Final Thoughts

I expected the end of this tour to be a gift shop with extra steps. It is more interesting than that. Once the 0.0 logo becomes visible on the tyre hubs, on the driver’s case, on the wall behind the podium, the whole sequence reads as one continuous argument that a brewer can sponsor motorsport responsibly, made in green neon at the end of a long afternoon.

And it is fun, which is the harder thing to engineer. I stood in a room built to celebrate a driver I do not support, in front of a trophy case belonging to a company whose main product I do not drink, and I still came out cheerful. Whoever designed these rooms knew exactly what they were doing.

Until next time!

The post Verstappen, Foosball and the End of the Heineken Tour appeared first on Bubbly Living.

I also once had a Dutch boyfriend who could not stop telling me about his country’s naval conquests. Which was fine. Every seafaring nation in Europe was elbowing the others aside at the time, and I am the last person entitled to object, since I have been known to claim that the Greeks invented everything and that the Romans simply took notes. I say it as a joke. I do not entirely mean it as one. Listening to somebody talk up their own heritage is one of my favourite things, partly because I recognise the tune.

So I paid attention in this room, and what I found was better than a list of victories. The sea did not only make the Dutch Republic rich. It decided what its artists painted, who paid them, and which version of events got hung on a wall.

The Rijksmuseum Maritime Room at a Glance
⚓ The centrepiece · The William Rex, a ~4-metre, 74-gun warship model of 1698, built at Vlissingen and fully rigged, standing for a ship that may never have existed.
🖼️ The masters · Willem van de Velde the Younger’s The Gust and The Cannon Shot, painted around 1680, in England, on Charles II’s payroll.
🗽 The twist · Schellinks’s calm golden Medway raid marks the campaign that ended with the Dutch keeping Suriname and letting the English keep New Amsterdam, now New York.
🏷️ Read the labels · Unusually candid: one admits an admiral paid for his own glory; another names the Dutch trade in enslaved Africans beneath a hero portrait.
💡 Tip · Start at the model, then read the walls; allow forty minutes if you like history.

A Ship That May Never Have Sailed

The room is built around a model. It is enormous, roughly four metres from stem to stern, a warship of seventy-four guns made in 1698 by dockyard craftsmen, with rigging and sails and rows of gun ports along two decks.

It is called the William Rex. It has only been called that since the nineteenth century, and the name comes from monograms carved into the stern, because the model cannot be convincingly matched to any ship that actually existed. One suggestion is that it was loosely based on a Zeeland vessel of ninety-four guns called the Koning William. Nobody is certain.

That is a good thing to know before looking at anything else in the room. The most commanding object here is a portrait of a ship that may never have put to sea, given a king’s name by people living a century and a half after it was built.

The Painters Who Went to Work for the Other Side

Dutch marine painting did not begin with a war. Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, working in Haarlem from around 1590, is generally credited as the pioneer of the genre, the first Dutch painter to specialise in the sea and in portraits of particular ships. What the wars did was give his successors a subject that patrons would pay for.

The two finest pictures in this room are by Willem van de Velde the Younger. One is catalogued as A Ship on the High Seas Caught by a Squall and known simply as The Gust, a warship heeled over under an enormous bank of cloud. The other, The Cannon Shot, shows a Dutch man-of-war on flat water firing a single gun, the smoke hanging in a slow white mass across half the canvas.

Both were painted around 1680, and both were painted in England. In the winter of 1672, the Republic’s disaster year, with the French invading and the Amsterdam art market collapsing, van de Velde and his father left for London. Charles II gave them each a salary of a hundred pounds a year and a studio in the Queen’s House at Greenwich, the father to draw sea fights and the son to put them into colour.

So the two supreme images of Dutch sea power in this gallery were made by a Dutchman on an English king’s payroll, within a decade of Dutch and English fleets shooting at each other. Reputation travelled better than loyalty did.

One Battle, Two Painters

Livorno is an Italian port, called Leghorn by English speakers at the time. A Dutch fleet beat an English one there in 1653, and that single battle hangs on these walls twice, in two completely different ways.

The first version is by Willem van de Velde the Elder, the father, and it is not painted in the ordinary sense at all. It is drawn in ink on canvas, in grey and white, a technique that produces something between a drawing and an engraving at wall scale. The English ship Samson burned there after an encounter with Cornelis Tromp’s warship the Halve Maan, and both vessels sit at the centre of the composition.

Then comes the line on the label that I went back and read twice. Tromp commissioned the picture to honour and glorify himself. The museum simply says so. And the work still hangs in its original frame, carved with the Tromp family coat of arms, so the family name is announced in carved wood above the battle, before anyone reaches the ships.

The second version is an oil by Reinier Nooms, who worked under the name Zeeman, meaning seaman. His fleets sit in a green swell under a tower of dark smoke, with men in the water in the foreground and a broken mast going under. The Dutch victory at Livorno gave them control of trade in the Mediterranean, which is the part that mattered to the people who paid for the painting.

The Raid That Cost the Dutch Manhattan

This is the painting I would send my ex-boyfriend, and it is the quietest picture in the room. A wide golden landscape at evening, hills, a river, small columns of smoke rising in the distance. It could be a view of anywhere.

It is the Medway. In June 1667 a Dutch fleet under Michiel de Ruyter sailed up the river and destroyed the English fleet at anchor off Chatham. It remains one of the worst humiliations in English naval history, and Willem Schellinks painted it as a pastoral.

Here is what my ex never mentioned. In 1664 the English had seized New Netherland, the Dutch colony stretching across parts of what are now several American states, and renamed its main town, New Amsterdam on Manhattan, as New York. The Medway raid broke English resolve three years later, and the Treaty of Breda was signed on 31 July 1667, a few weeks after it. The terms let the English keep the colony, while the Dutch kept Suriname and its sugar. Offered a choice between Manhattan and a plantation colony, the Republic took the plantations.

They did have it back briefly. In August 1673 a Dutch fleet of twenty-one ships under Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest and Jacob Binckes retook the city and renamed it New Orange. They gave it up again at the Treaty of Westminster in 1674.

He also used to tell me the Dutch discovered Manhattan. That one needs unpicking too. The 1609 voyage was made by Henry Hudson, an Englishman under contract to the Dutch East India Company, who had been sent to find a northern route to Asia and sailed west instead. The river he went up was later named after him. The Lenape had been living on the island a very long time before anybody arrived to give it a different name.

Michiel, and What the Label Admits

There is a portrait in this room of a man in black with a commander’s baton, a globe at his elbow and a fleet visible past a stone balustrade. His name is Michiel de Ruyter. Michiel was also my ex-boyfriend’s first name, so I arrived at this picture already rolling my eyes.

Ferdinand Bol painted it in 1667. De Ruyter is the admiral who led the Medway raid, and in 1664 he had been sent across the Atlantic with orders that included doing damage to New Netherland. He never got there. He retook the Dutch trading posts in West Africa, attacked Barbados the following April, was badly mauled, repaired at Martinique and went north to raid the Newfoundland fisheries. No territory in the Americas was recovered.

The label beside him does something I did not expect. It says he won naval battles and freed enslaved European Christians, and that he also captured forts in West Africa, and that this gave a boost to the Dutch trade in Africans. The museum puts that on the wall next to the hero, in two languages, at eye level. In a room this full of national pride, that sentence is doing more work than any of the cannon smoke.

A few steps away hangs another Bol, and this one made me laugh out loud, in the muffled way a gallery permits. It shows Aeneas handing a wreath to a ship’s captain on a quayside, taken from Virgil. It was painted for the Amsterdam Admiralty.

So the men who ran the Dutch navy hung a scene from a Roman epic on their own wall, to instruct themselves in how to govern. My joke about the Greeks and the Romans turns out to have a third act I did not know about, in which seventeenth-century Amsterdam borrowed the whole apparatus to explain itself to itself.

Smoke, Wreckage and a Flagship Going Down

Two pictures in this room are almost entirely weather and gunpowder.

Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraten painted the Battle of Terheide, fought on 10 August 1653 during the first of the wars with England. Ships are dismasted in the foreground, men are in the water at the lower edge, a red flag hangs off a broken hull. The Dutch broke the English blockade of their coast in that battle and lost their commander in it, Maerten Harpertsz Tromp, who was fatally wounded.

Beside it, van de Velde the Younger’s Kijkduin is so dark that for centuries people called it the Nocturnal Battle. It is not night. The action took place in daylight on 21 August 1673, and what looks like darkness is smoke and powder haze thick enough to swallow a fleet.

The detail that stopped me is at the right-hand edge. That burning, listing hull going down is the Dutch admiral’s ship. Cornelis Tromp, son of the Tromp who died at Terheide, carried on fighting the battle from a vessel he had captured. A painting made to commemorate a Dutch action puts the Dutch flagship on the seabed and expects the viewer to admire the improvisation.

The Sea as Ceremony

The last picture I want to mention has no fighting in it at all, and it is the one that puts the rest in context.

Lieve Pietersz Verschuier painted the arrival of Charles II at Rotterdam on 24 May 1660. Charles had spent years in exile, his father executed and the English monarchy abolished. Then parliament in London asked him back, and on the journey from Breda to London he stopped in Rotterdam, where the city turned out to watch.

The water is crowded with small boats. Flags fly from every mast. It is the same sea, the same ships, the same painters, doing the opposite job: not a victory but a welcome, seven years before the same king’s fleet was burning on the Medway.

Bubbly Tips

• Start at the model and work outwards. The William Rex sits in the middle of the floor and everything on the walls relates to it. Once you understand what a seventy-four-gun ship looked like, the paintings stop being brown weather and start being legible.
• Read the labels properly in this room. They are unusually candid. One tells you an admiral paid for his own glorification, another names the Dutch trade in enslaved Africans directly beneath a hero portrait. The wall texts are half the experience here.
• Look at the frames as well as the pictures. The big pen painting keeps its original frame carved with the commissioning family’s coat of arms. Several others carry title plaques along the bottom rail. The framing is part of the argument being made.
• Find the painted sheet of paper. In the lower left corner of Zeeman’s Livorno there is a trompe l’oeil document listing the ships in the battle. It is easy to walk past and it is the sort of thing that repays standing still.
• Get close to the darkest canvas. The Kijkduin painting looks like a brown rectangle from six feet away. From two feet you can pick out a burning hull, a boat full of men and a flag still flying.
• There is seating. Benches sit along one side of the gallery, which is worth knowing if you have already done several hours of museum. This is a good room to sit down in.
• Photograph the model from the short end. Side-on you get a long dark hull. From bow or stern you get the rigging, the carving and the depth of the room behind it.
• Allow forty minutes if you like history. Ten will get you round it. Forty will get you the connections between the pictures, which is where the interest actually is.
• Combine it with the Gallery of Honour, which is a short walk away and holds a van de Velde of its own, so you can see the same painter working at a different pitch.
• Finish outside in the gardens. After an hour of smoke and sinking ships, a bench among the hedges is exactly the right correction.

Final Thoughts

I came into this room expecting ships and left thinking about publicity. Almost everything here was paid for by somebody who wanted a version of events to survive: an admiral commissioning his own triumph, an admiralty hanging Virgil above its desks, a trading chamber ordering a battle scene that doubled as an advertisement for a shipping route. That is not a criticism. It is what art has usually been for.

What I keep returning to is the model in the centre of the floor, magnificent and complete down to the pumps and the anchors, carrying a king’s name it was given long after the fact, standing in for a ship that probably never existed. My ex would have loved it. I would have let him talk.

Until next time!

The post Ships, Smoke and Glory: The Rijksmuseum’s Maritime Room appeared first on Bubbly Living.

The room is the historic brew room, and it is the part of the tour I would go back for. Everything else in the building has been designed for visitors. This has not. It is a factory floor that stopped working and was left where it stood.

The Historic Brew Room at a Glance
🏭 What it is · A 1913 brew hall by Rotterdam architect Arie Heederik, the oldest surviving part of the Heineken complex and a national monument since 2006.
🫖 Eight copper kettles · Four originals from 1913 (red neck signs) and four added in 1956 (yellow). An oval wall plaque tells them apart.
🪟 Church-window glass · Full walls of coloured leaded glass and glazed brick, in a room built to boil grain.
🔍 The best bit · An opening cut into one kettle lets you lean in: the unpolished, stained working interior, with a film playing inside.
💡 Tip · Find the oval plaque first, then look inside the kettle. The mixing is a demonstration, not a tasting; beer comes later.

A Brew House From 1913

The brew house went up between 1911 and 1913, to a design by the Rotterdam architect Arie Heederik. It rises six storeys behind a front on the Stadhouderskade, and it is the oldest part of the Heineken complex still standing. Everything around it came later or came down.

It has been a national monument since 2006. There is a detail here that pleased me more than it should have: the building is also KLM Delft Blue miniature number 95. I own three of those little houses, none of them this one, and I have been looking at the shape of Dutch buildings in that collection for years without connecting one to a brewery I would eventually walk into.

Eight Kettles and Two Dates

There are eight copper kettles, and they are not all the same age. A brown and white oval plaque on the tiled wall explains how to tell them apart, and it is the single most useful thing written anywhere in the room.

Four of the kettles are the originals, commissioned and installed in 1913, and each of those carries a red sign on its neck. In 1956 four more were added, standing on the ground once occupied by Gerard Adriaan Heineken’s own brew house, and those are marked in yellow. Nothing else distinguishes them by age. They are the same copper, polished to the same finish, and without the plaque a visitor walks past forty-three years of difference without noticing. They are not all the same size, though, and they were not all doing the same job. Small brass plates on the necks name each vessel and give its capacity, and the numbering runs separately for each type, so there is more than one vessel labelled number two.

There is a correction to make here, and it is one I would rather make than let stand. This room looks untouched, and I described it that way to myself while I was in it. It is not quite. The brew hall sits partly inside the 1911 to 1913 building and partly inside an extension added on the right-hand side between 1956 and 1958. When the complex was protected, that extension and the brewing fittings inside it were specifically left out of the listing. So half of what looks like one continuous Edwardian room is post-war, and the joint is invisible.

Glass, Tile and the Names of the Stages

The walls are glazed brick, cream and brown, laid in arches over tall windows. The windows are leaded and coloured, red and yellow and pale green in geometric patterns, with fan shapes in the arched heads and small round lights above. They belong in a church, or in the kind of bank built to advertise its own permanence. They are in a room built to boil grain.

Hanging from the pipework above each vessel is a round enamelled sign with a wheel design, and each one names the stage that happened there. One reads BREWING, and underneath, that a part of the mash is boiled. Another reads COOKING, and underneath, that the wort is cooked and the hops are added. The room labels its own process, in English, at head height. Once I had noticed the first one I went looking for the rest.

Looking Inside a Kettle

The best moment came at an opening cut into the side of one of the kettles, wide enough to lean into. Inside, the vessel is not polished at all. It is dark, stained, and crossed by a ring of iron rake arms hanging from a central shaft, the whole assembly sitting above a floor laid in a fine radiating pattern.

A short film plays on the inside wall at the same time. That combination did something no display panel had managed: the outside of these kettles is a museum object, and the inside is a piece of machinery that spent decades full of hot grain and was never meant to be looked at.

Four Ingredients

Our guide set out four glass jars on a wooden board. Water in the first, whole barley grains in the second, dried hop flowers in the third, and a fine pale powder in the fourth.

By Heineken’s own account the beer rests on four things: malted barley, water, hops and the company’s A-yeast, the strain isolated in 1886 that the main post goes into. The barley is malted before brewing, which is what turns its starch into something that will ferment. The hops go in later, for flavour and as a preservative. The water does more work than it gets credit for.

The Guide Made the Beer

Then he mixed them. Not for us to drink, and nobody was offered a glass. He put the ingredients into a steel vessel and stirred them with a long paddle, so that we could watch the thing happen at a scale we could see rather than imagine.

What came out was cloudy and brown, with grain still floating in it and drifts of husk settled against one side. That liquid is wort, the sweet unfermented base that every one of the copper kettles in the room was built to handle. Seeing it made by hand in a steel bucket, in a room built to handle it in hundreds of hectolitres at a time, is the clearest explanation of industrial scale I have been given anywhere.

Help the Brewer

Along one wall, at floor level, there is a small display of the tools the job used to need. A wooden wheelbarrow with a metal liner, worn down at the handles. A hand-cranked mill on a wooden stand, with a hopper on top. A galvanised churn with a lid. Two signs above them read Help the Brewer.

This is the part of the room I keep thinking about. The kettles are impressive because they are enormous and made of copper. The wheelbarrow is affecting because somebody pushed it. A brewery this size ran on people carrying, lifting, grinding and hauling, in heat, for a century, and the polished vessels upstairs are the only part of that anyone photographs.

The Last Brew

Brewing stopped here in 1988 and moved to Zoeterwoude, outside Leiden. The city brewery had become impossible: too little room, too much traffic, and a modernisation bill nobody wanted to pay.

It did not end quietly. On 22 April 1988 staff and board gathered in the Koelschip, the coolship room upstairs, and drank a beer called Brouwsel 1466. It was the last batch to come out of these copper kettles. I like that it has a number rather than a name. Brew 1466, logged like all the others, and then nothing after it.

Bubbly Tips

• Find the oval plaque before you look at the kettles. It is on the tiled wall and it tells you that red signs on the neck mean 1913 and yellow signs mean 1956. Without it the eight vessels read as one set.
• Put your head into the opening in the kettle. It is easy to walk past. The interior is unpolished and there is a short film playing inside, and it is the only place in the building where you see the working side of the equipment.
• Read the round signs hanging above the vessels. Each one names a brewing stage in English and describes what happened in that vessel. They are original fittings doing the job of a modern label, and they are better written than most modern labels.
• Ask the guide to slow down on the ingredients. The four jars take two minutes if nobody asks anything and a quarter of an hour if somebody does. This is where a VIP guide earns the ticket price.
• Look up at the windows, not just the copper. The leaded glass runs the full height of one wall. Most visitors photograph the kettles with their backs to it.
• Do not expect to taste anything here. The mixing is a demonstration, not a tasting. The beer comes later in the tour, in the bar.
• Go early in your tour slot if you can. The brew room is on the standard route as well as the VIP one, so groups cycle through it. Wait a few minutes and you will get the hall without other people in the frame.
• Wear something you can move in. The route through this part of the building uses stairs, and the good angles are from the upper walkway looking down.
• Bring a wide lens or step back to the rail. The kettles are close together and tall, and from ground level you cannot get a whole vessel in without backing up to the far side of the walkway.

Final Thoughts

I went in with no interest in beer and came out able to explain, roughly, what a wort kettle does. That is not nothing for an hour. The trick the room pulls is that it does not have to reconstruct anything. The kettles are where they were, the signs above them still name the stages, and the tiles and the glass have been in place since a decade when Amsterdam still had four big breweries working inside the city.

What stayed with me was not the copper. It was the wheelbarrow, and the plaque that quietly admits half the room is younger than it looks. This is a company museum, and it is honest in places I did not expect it to be.

Until next time!

The post Inside the Historic Brew Room at the Heineken Experience appeared first on Bubbly Living.

I went in before my museum visit and again afterwards, then passed through more than once on later days. It turned into the part of the trip I kept going back to, and it took those repeat visits to work out how much is standing in it.

The Rijksmuseum Gardens at a Glance
🌳 What it is · A free, unticketed garden wrapping the Rijksmuseum, designed by Pierre Cuypers as an “outdoor museum” of clipped parterres, ponds and salvaged Dutch architecture.
🗿 What’s in it · A bronze of Mercury and Psyche (original by Adriaen de Vries, 1593, now in the Louvre), salvaged city gates, a 19th-century greenhouse, and a summer sculpture show.
⛲ The trick fountain · Jeppe Hein’s Hide and See(k) shoots walls of water from the paving; there’s a ~12-second pause between cycles to dash through dry.
⏱️ Timing · Near-empty before noon, no seat left by early afternoon on a warm day.
💡 Tip · Cross under the museum via Museumstraat to reach the other half, where the salvaged gates and fragments are; it’s easy to miss.

A Garden That Came With the Building

Pierre Cuypers, the Dutch architect who designed the Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam Central Station, drew the grounds as well as the building. The museum went up between 1876 and 1885. The garden, with its railings and its collection of salvaged building fragments, follows a Cuypers design of 1884 and was laid out in stages up to 1916. Garden, railings and fragments are protected together as a single entry in the national monuments register.

Cuypers meant the grounds to work as an outdoor museum. Pieces of Dutch buildings facing demolition were brought here and re-erected, including the Berg gate from Deventer and arches from the Kleine Kerk in Edam. The idea was that a visitor could walk out of the galleries and keep looking at the same national history, only in stone and in the open air.

The garden closed along with the museum for the long renovation and reopened in 2013. The Dutch firm Copijn handled the new layout, working from a later Cuypers plan of 1901. What survives from the original is the compartmented structure. Instead of one sweeping park, the space is divided into sections, each laid out in a different old Dutch garden style.

Since the reopening the garden has also carried a sculpture exhibition each summer, given over to a single twentieth-century artist. The first was devoted to the British sculptor Henry Moore, with twelve works brought across from Perry Green, the estate in Hertfordshire where he lived and worked from 1940.

Hedges, Bulbs and Straight Lines

The section I spent most of my time in is laid out as a series of rectangles. Low hedges, clipped flat on top and squared at the corners, enclose beds of bulbs. Gravel paths run between them at right angles. Taller hedges rise to well above head height along one edge and shut the street out completely.

In late April the beds were doing two different things at once. One held white narcissi standing above grassy foliage, still in full flower. Another, under a large old tree with its branches barely in leaf, had gone over to blue, a low haze of it running the whole length of the bed.

Metal chairs stand about in loose groups near the hedges, not fixed down and not arranged in rows. A garden with movable seating is a garden built for staying in rather than passing through.

Mercury and Psyche

One bronze stands on a stone plinth in the middle of a bed, high enough to be seen over the hedges from most of the garden. It shows Mercury, the messenger of the Roman gods, carrying Psyche upwards, one arm raised, one foot resting on a small support. The whole group twists as it rises.

The original was made by Adriaen de Vries in 1593 for the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. De Vries was Dutch, trained in the workshop of the sculptor Giambologna in Italy, and spent his working life abroad, which is why so little of his output ever stayed in the Netherlands. The sculpture was carried off by Swedish troops as war booty when Prague fell in 1648, changed hands again, and ended up in the Louvre, where it remains. What stands in the garden is a bronze cast made for the museum after that original.

Two Kinds of Water

The garden runs water in two registers, and they could not be less alike.

The first is a fountain with no basin above ground. Jets rise straight out of a flat metal grating set into the paving, roughly the height of a person, forming walls of water that go up and drop away again. This is Hide and See(k), made by the Danish artist Jeppe Hein and installed in 2013. The layout is a circle nine metres across with a square of three and a half metres inside it, and the jets switch between four arrangements. There is a pause of about twelve seconds between them, which is the window for walking into the middle without getting soaked. It is a modern version of the bedriegertjes, the hidden trick fountains that seventeenth-century Dutch garden designers used to drench unsuspecting guests.

The second is older in character and completely still. A rectangular pond sits below the level of the surrounding lawn, edged in brick and stone, with one modest jet in the centre. The water had gone green, planting spilled over the edges, and the surface held the reflection of the building above it.

Full by Early Afternoon

Arrive on a warm afternoon and there is nowhere left to sit.

Every chair along the hedge line was taken. People had spread out on the grass beside the pond, one or two of them flat on their backs, and the paths carried a steady flow between the museum steps and the street gate. Nothing about it was unpleasant. It is just a busy garden by then.

Late morning is another garden entirely. On an earlier visit, before noon, the beds were near enough deserted, the chairs stood about unoccupied and the fountain ran to nobody at all. Two people were standing by the passage entrance and that was the extent of it. A couple of hours is all it takes.

The Half I Did Not Find

Museumstraat crosses the grounds from north to south and dives under the building through the central passage, which means the garden is not one space but two. I only ever walked in the half I entered, and I never worked out how to get across to the other one.

That was my loss. The south-west corner of the grounds is where the salvaged building fragments are gathered, along with the Fragmentengebouw, a structure assembled out of more of them. A sandstone garden pavilion of 1735 by the Amsterdam sculptor Ignatius van Logteren stands in the grounds as well, and there is a children’s playground with equipment by the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck. Two more Cuypers buildings survive here too: the former director’s villa of 1883 and the Teekenschool, the museum’s old drawing school, of 1891.

None of that is hidden. It is simply on the other side of a street that runs under a building, which is an easier thing to miss than it sounds.

The Streets Around Museumplein

Walking away from the garden, what struck me was how residential the surrounding streets are. Ordinary flats, ordinary front doors, people carrying shopping. For a district built around three major museums and a concert hall, it is a very ordinary place to live, and it was designed that way from the start.

The expropriation law passed in 1874 cleared the ground for two things at once: the Rijksmuseum, and a smart residential quarter to sit alongside it. The housing had to wait. A royal wax candle factory occupied part of the site and did not close until 1906. The street pattern was set out from 1902, following designs Cuypers had drawn in 1891, and construction of the quarter itself began in 1907. Museumplein is bounded by Paulus Potterstraat, Stadhouderskade, Gabriel Metsustraat and Van Baerlestraat, and the streets behind those edges are where the district actually lives.

Some of those houses now hold other things. Paulus Potterstraat runs along the northern edge of the square towards the Rijksmuseum towers, and the terrace along it carries the Diamond Museum at number 8 and the House of Bols at number 14, both fitted into buildings that were put up as homes.

Bubbly Tips

• Check the opening season before you travel. The museum’s own admissions page states the gardens open only in summer, from 9am to 6pm, while other sources describe them as open year round during daylight. The gates were open when I visited in late April. Check the official Rijksmuseum site close to your trip rather than trusting a summary elsewhere.
• Go in before your museum visit, not only after. Twenty minutes in the garden first gives you a sense of the building’s exterior, its towers and tiled panels, which is hard to reconstruct once you are inside looking at paintings.
• Cross Museumstraat to reach the other half. The passage runs right under the museum. Walk through it and turn into the garden on the far side, or you will see only half of what is there, as I did.
• Look for the salvaged fragments. The Berg gate from Deventer and arches from the Kleine Kerk in Edam are among the pieces of demolished Dutch buildings re-erected in the grounds. They sit in the south-west corner.
• Time your run at the fountain. Hide and See(k) pauses for roughly twelve seconds between arrangements. That is your window to walk into the centre dry, and it is worth watching a full cycle before you commit.
• Bring your own drink outside the summer months. The garden pavilion serves refreshments seasonally. When I was there in April nothing was open outdoors, and the café I used was inside the museum, which needs a ticket before 5pm.
• Move a chair. The metal seating is not fixed. Take one into the sun or into the shade of the big tree depending on what you want.
• Photograph from the top of the steps. The raised ground by the passage entrance gives you the pond, the hedges, the glasshouse and the crowd in one frame. From ground level you get hedges and not much else.
• Visit late morning if you want it quiet. The garden was near empty before noon and busy by early afternoon on a warm day. The difference is considerable and costs nothing to plan around.
• Pair it with Museumplein and Vondelpark. Both are a short walk away and the three together make an easy half day outdoors without another admission fee.

Final Thoughts

What I liked most about this garden is how little it asks of anyone. There is no ticket, no queue and no route to follow. A visitor can walk in off the street, sit down in a chair that somebody else left in the sun, and stay as long as they like within sight of a building that holds The Night Watch. That combination is not common.

It also quietly does the job Cuypers wanted it to do. The bronze on its plinth carries a story that runs from Prague in 1593 through a Swedish army to a gallery in Paris. The stone gates and arches in the far corner were rescued from demolition sites across the Netherlands. None of it is behind glass. My only regret is the half I never found, which is as good a reason as any to go back.

Until next time!

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