It produced something else. I never found the orchids at all, and the hour I spent not finding them turned out to be the best part of my day at Keukenhof.

The Keukenhof Lake at a Glance
🌊 What it is · The oldest part of Keukenhof: a 19th-century English landscape lake laid out by the Zochers in 1857, decades before the tulips arrived.
🌉 On the circuit · A low stone bridge, the Wilhelmina Pavilion (shop, food, toilets, no flowers), stepping stones across the water, and a four-jet fountain.
🔵 The overlooked bit · Ribbons of blue muscari, hyacinths, rhododendrons and azaleas do most of the compositional work, and almost nobody photographs them.
🏰 History · The estate’s manor (now Keukenhof Castle) dates to 1641; the name means “kitchen garden.” The flower show only opened in 1950.
💡 Tip · Walk the full lake circuit (~30–40 min), the quietest part of the park, and don’t look for the orchids in the Wilhelmina.

A Park Older Than the Flower Show

The first thing worth knowing is that the lake was here long before the tulips were.

The manor house at the heart of the estate went up in 1641 for Adriaen Maertensz Block, a captain and governor of the Dutch East India Company. It still stands, as Keukenhof Castle, though it sits outside the flower park altogether, about five hundred metres to the south-west with its own grounds and its own gate. In 1857 the owners of the Keukenhof estate commissioned Jan David Zocher and his son Louis Paul Zocher to redesign the grounds around their castle in the English landscape style. That means curves rather than axes, long sightlines framed by trees, open lawns, and water shaped to look as though it happened on its own. The Zochers also laid out the Vondelpark in Amsterdam, which explains why both places handle their trees the same way.

The bulb growers only arrived in 1949, proposing an open-air exhibition to show off the Dutch trade, and the park opened to the public in 1950. So the flower displays are ninety-three years younger than the ground they sit on. What looks like a garden built around tulips is actually a nineteenth-century landscape park that gets dressed each spring.

The Bridge and the Pavilion That Sells Sandwiches

Walking north-west, the path arrives at a low stone bridge over the water, and on the far bank sits the Wilhelmina Pavilion, orange parasols out, a queue at the counter and a red tiled roof behind the trees.

I did not go in, and it turns out there would have been no point looking for flowers there. The Wilhelmina is one of the only pavilions at Keukenhof with no floral displays at all. It has a shop, food and drink, and the toilets. That is the whole offer, and the building is honest about it.

Which is worth saying plainly, because a visitor hunting for a specific exhibition can lose twenty minutes to the assumption that every pavilion holds one. For the record, the orchid and anthurium show normally lives in the Beatrix Pavilion in the far north-east corner, and in the 2026 season it moved to the Juliana Pavilion. I was looking in the one building guaranteed not to have it.

Stepping Stones

Just along from the bridge, a line of flat discs runs out across the water towards the fountain, and people were crossing them one at a time.

A man in a blue cap went first, then a girl in a pink jumper stopped in the middle to look down, then a queue formed on the bank. A dachshund crossed on a lead without breaking stride. I stayed on the grass and watched, which was the right call in the shoes I had on, and the view of it was better from the bank anyway.

The Fountain

The fountain sits out in the middle of the lake and throws four jets, and every path along that side of the water ends up pointing at it.

One oak on the bank has grown out almost horizontally over the water, all twisted bare limbs, and it frames the fountain from the path. The far shore reads as a long band of colour at that distance, the individual beds dissolving into stripes of red and yellow and blue.

Standing still for a minute, the water noise takes over from the crowd noise. It is the only place in the park where that happens.

Not Only Tulips

The other correction the lake made to my thinking is that Keukenhof is not a tulip garden. It is a bulb garden, and the tulips are simply the loudest thing in it.

Ribbons of muscari, the small deep blue grape hyacinths, run in long curving bands through the grass, with paler pink and cream hyacinths beside them. Behind those come blocks of red, then orange, then a solid yellow mass. The blue is doing the work that gravel or box hedging would do in a formal garden: it draws the line the eye follows.

Along the wooded bank the planting changes again: magenta and white tulips in drifts under old trees, a low outcrop of grey rock, spears of foliage not yet in flower, and a pine hanging low over the whole arrangement. Rhododendrons and azaleas in hot pink sit at the water’s edge near the bridge. None of it is tulips, and all of it is the reason the lake looks better than the show beds.

The One Straight Line

Further round, the park drops its curves for a moment. A narrow formal water channel runs away between paved edges, borders of mixed tulips packed tight on both sides, blue muscari at the front, and the smooth grey trunks of mature beeches standing behind.

It is the one piece of straight-line geometry in a park built on the principle of not having any, and the contrast is what makes it work. The beeches do most of it. Their trunks are pale and branchless for the first several metres, so the eye reads them as columns, and the tulips at their feet look planted in a nave.

Watching People

What I actually did for the last stretch was stop walking.

There were families on the grass, children hanging over the edge of the water, dogs on leads, several couples taking the same photograph in turn, and a steady traffic of people going nowhere in particular. Nobody was queuing for anything. The paths are wide enough on that side that a park taking twenty-six thousand people a day stops pressing in on anybody.

I had come out of an exhibition hall looking for another exhibition hall, and the best hour of the visit turned out to be the bit between them.

Bubbly Tips

• Do not look for the orchids in the Wilhelmina Pavilion. It is one of the only pavilions with no floral display at all: shop, food, drinks and toilets. The orchid and anthurium show is normally in the Beatrix Pavilion in the north-east corner, but in 2026 it moved to the Juliana. Check the map at the gate rather than assuming, because the pavilions do swap shows between seasons.
• Use the Wilhelmina anyway. It is the natural stop on the lake circuit if you need a coffee, a toilet or twenty minutes off your feet, and the terrace outside has the best outlook of any food stop in the park.
• Walk the whole lake, not half of it. The circuit takes around thirty to forty minutes at a wandering pace and it is the quietest part of Keukenhof. Most visitors cut between pavilions and miss it entirely.
• The stone bridge is the reflection shot. Stand on the south bank looking across at the pavilion and the water does the rest. Earlier in the day gives you stiller water and fewer people sitting on the parapet.
• The stepping stones are more solid than they look. They are broad, flat and stable, and children and dogs were crossing without trouble. A queue builds at busy times, so either commit or watch from the bank.
• Look for the things that are not tulips. The muscari ribbons, the hyacinths, the daffodils, the rhododendrons and the azaleas around the lake are doing most of the compositional work, and almost nobody photographs them.
• Season and hours matter more here than at most attractions. The 2026 season ran 19 March to 10 May, daily from eight until seven. Outside those eight weeks the park is closed to the public entirely.
• Arrive early if you want the water calm. The classic still-reflection photographs happen in the first hour after opening, before the wind picks up and before the paths fill.
• Getting there without a car is straightforward. Buses run to Keukenhof from Haarlem, Leiden and Schiphol, and a combined bus and entry ticket is usually the cheaper option.

Final Thoughts

The lake is the oldest thing at Keukenhof and the least advertised. Everything in the brochures is a display: a pavilion, a show, a themed garden, seven million bulbs arranged by people who do this for a living. The lake is just a nineteenth-century landscape park doing what the Zochers designed it to do, with a spring’s worth of colour laid along its banks as a seasonal extra.

I went looking for a room full of orchids and did not find it. What I got instead was a stone bridge, a fountain, a line of people crossing water on stepping stones and a dachshund, and a bed of blue muscari running through grass like a river. If the orchids had been where I thought they were, I would have walked past all of it.

Until next time!

The post The Keukenhof Lake: What I Found Looking for the Orchids appeared first on Bubbly Living.

The roof was not quiet, exactly. But the noise arrived thinned out, the way a party sounds from the street outside, and it turned out to be the most restful twenty minutes of the whole day.

The Heineken Rooftop at a Glance
🏙️ What it is · A bar and open terrace on the sixth floor of the old brewery, in the former malt attic (Moutzolder), with a view north-west over the canal to the Rijksmuseum.
🎟️ How to reach it · Not on the standard tour. Add “Tour + Rooftop” (with two drinks) or book a rooftop-only ticket. Adults only, ID at the door.
🍺 The beer · Home of Heineken Studio, the small-batch experimental brews, led by Mokum750, the wheat pilsner brewed for Amsterdam’s 750th birthday. Not sold in shops.
🕛 Hours · The roof opens at noon (not with the attraction at 10.30) and closes at 7pm, or 8.30 Fri/Sat.
💡 Tip · Take the stairs through Silo 10, face north-west for the view, and try what Studio has on that day.

Six Floors Up

The bar occupies the sixth floor of the old brewery, and the terrace opens off it onto the roof. Most people reach it by lift, which runs up the inside of one of the brewery’s grain silos from the entrance hall. We walked part of the way, including the stretch that goes through the silo itself.

That stretch is worth doing on foot. It passes through the structure rather than around it, and it is beautifully lit, which I had not expected of the inside of a grain silo. The stencil on the concrete says SILO 10 in red capitals. Above it the timber floor and glass balustrade of the modern bar, below it a curved grey wall that used to hold grain.

The Malt Attic

The room is called the Moutzolder, the malt attic. Barley arrived by water, went up to the top of the building, and worked its way down through the floors as it was processed, which is why the grain store is the highest room and the kettles are far below it.

Almost none of that has been hidden. Arched concrete ribs run up into the roof. Recessed alcoves are lit orange and lettered in red with the old words: MOUTZOLDER, GERSTEMOUT, HEINEKEN BROUWERIJ MAATSCHAPPIJ. Green benches sit in the alcoves, and most of them were empty. It was late in the day on King’s Day and the whole city was outdoors and down at water level, which meant one of the busiest attractions in Amsterdam had room to spare. A neon lightbulb over the stairs reads TEST + TASTE + TELL, and dried barley stands in a planter along the balustrade.

A Bar Made of Bottles

The bar itself runs most of the length of the room, and its entire front is built from green Heineken bottles stacked on their sides and lit from within.

Above it hangs a cluster of long light tubes at angles, and a neon sign on the far column reads PILOT BREWS. Behind the counter the shelves carry more green bottles, the taps run in a row, and two screens above the back bar cycle through what is on.

Heineken Studio

That column sign is the clue to what this floor actually is. The rooftop bar houses Heineken Studio, the company’s innovation operation, and the beers made there are small batches that are not sold anywhere else.

The tap on the mobile counter lists eight things to choose between: extra dry, double hopped, witte, amber, Heineken Studio, floral, zest fusion and spritz. Our guide went through them one at a time. It was pouring, not standing there for show. The counter is wrapped in tape printed with the Studio logo and the words WORK IN PROGRESS, which is branding rather than building work, though it takes a second look to be sure. The screens over the main bar were pushing flavoured foam tops as well, in bitter blood orange and espresso.

Mokum750

I did not choose mine. The guide recommended the Mokum750, and it turns out to have a better story than anything else on the board.

Mokum is the city’s own nickname for itself. The 750 is Amsterdam‘s age: the city marked its seven hundred and fiftieth birthday on the twenty-seventh of October 2025, after a festival year leading up to it. Heineken brewed this for the occasion, and it was the first beer Studio released. It is an unfiltered wheat pilsner at 5.5 per cent, made with coriander seed and lemon peel, hopped with Citra and fermented with Heineken’s own A-yeast.

I do not drink beer, as anyone who has read the last three of these will know. I tried it anyway, because a beer brewed for a city’s birthday is not the moment to order a soft drink, and because standing on a roof above that city on its national holiday made the arithmetic hard to argue with. It is light and citrusy and does not taste much like Heineken. I had a few mouthfuls, took the glass outside with me, and left it at that.

Out on the Roof

The terrace runs along the southern side of the building in timber decking, with a broad red stripe painted across it in the shape of the star.

Vines climb a grey wall at the back, with the Heineken wordmark and red star mounted in the middle of them. A cornhole board sat on the boards in front of it, unused the whole time I was there. Long green benches curve round in circles in the middle of the deck, and there are high tables and stools along the glass.

Nobody was hurrying anybody along. People sat with a glass, looked out, took a photograph, sat back down.

The View

The view runs north and west across the rooftops, and the height is not the reason it works. The Rijksmuseum is close enough to read the clock on it.

A walkway runs the length of the roof beside a long gabled structure with a glazed end wall. From the railing the Singelgracht lies directly below, with a houseboat moored along it and cars parked under the plane trees.

Away to the east, a long modern block carries the Heineken name in green along its top floor. Beyond that the roofline runs out towards the towers of the centre.

A telescope stands at the rail and costs nothing to use. Around it on the afternoon I was there stood a row of people in orange scarves and orange hats, taking turns.

King’s Day From The Rooftop

The best of it is to the north-west, where the Rijksmuseum’s towers rise over the trees.

Below it, on the water, the boats were going past three and four at a time, every one of them loaded with people in orange. On the bridge at the bottom right of the frame, a market stall and a crowd. It was the same day I had spent down at street level, and from up here it played out as something I could watch rather than something I was standing in.

That is what the rooftop is actually for, and it has nothing to do with beer. Twenty minutes of altitude in the middle of a day with none.

Bubbly Tips

• Work out which ticket gets you up there. The standard Heineken Tour at €24.95 does not include the roof. Tour plus Rooftop is €29.95 with two drinks. There is a rooftop-only ticket with two drinks and no tour at all, which is the one to book if the brewery exhibits do not appeal. If you have already bought a standard ticket, ask staff in the entrance hall about adding the roof. Rooftop access came with my VIP tour, but the published VIP description does not list it, so confirm that at booking rather than assuming.
• Twenty minutes is enough, thirty is plenty. Official guidance suggests allowing thirty to forty-five extra minutes. I lingered for twenty and had seen everything, though nobody was rushing anyone out.
• Take the stairs. They run through the wall of Silo 10 with the stencil still on the concrete, which is a better piece of the building than the lift shaft. The Moutzolder is on the sixth floor, so check how many flights that means from wherever the tour leaves you before committing.
• Bring photo identification. The whole attraction is strictly eighteen and over and they check at the door.
• Do not plan lunch around it. The rooftop bar sells snacks alongside the drinks, but there is no full dining anywhere on site. The restaurants of De Pijp are a few minutes away at street level.
• The roof does not open until midday. The attraction below opens at half past ten, but the rooftop bar runs noon to seven, or noon to half past eight on Fridays and Saturdays. The terrace is also open to the sky with nothing overhead, so dress for whatever the day is doing.
• Ask what Studio has on that day. The experimental beers are small batches and they rotate. Mokum750 was still on draught in late April 2026, but do not travel for a specific one.
• Face north-west. The Rijksmuseum and the canal are the view worth standing at, over on the far side of the deck. The telescope there is free, and tripods and drones are not permitted.

Final Thoughts

The rooftop bar is a commercial space at the top of a commercial attraction, and I am not going to pretend the glass of Mokum750 in my hand was anything other than a product with a marketing story attached. But the story happened to be true, and it happened to line up. A beer brewed for Amsterdam’s seven hundred and fiftieth birthday, tasted on a roof above the city on the King’s birthday, by someone who does not drink beer.

The thing I would go back for is not on the menu. It is the gap between the noise down on the water and the noise up on the deck: same city, same afternoon, two entirely different volumes. On the loudest day of the Dutch calendar, six floors of brewery turned out to be exactly the right amount of distance.

Until next time!

The post The Heineken Rooftop Bar: Amsterdam From Above appeared first on Bubbly Living.

They were right.

De Kraai at a Glance
🥞 What it is · A pancake restaurant on the main path at Zaanse Schans, in an 18th-century granary floated here from Wormerveer in 1976. Free to enter, opens 9am.
📏 The pancake · A pannenkoek, 29cm across, thin, dense and unleavened, eaten as a full meal, not a breakfast stack. One is lunch.
🍳 Watch the griddle · A rotating carousel of cast-iron pans cooks a dozen at once; fillings are laid onto the wet batter so they cook in, not on top.
🔵 Don’t miss the smuiger · A floor-to-ceiling Delft-blue tiled Zaan fireplace, with a tile picture of the building’s 1976 barge journey beside it.
💡 Tip · Order one, go savoury (bacon and cheese), eat at half past three to dodge the coach crowds, and use the Zaanse Schans ticket discount.

A Warehouse That Arrived by Barge

Restaurant De Kraai stands at Kraaienpad 1, close to the car park and the village entrance, which makes it either the first building at Zaanse Schans or the last depending on which way round the day goes. It is a long green timber warehouse with white window frames, oak barrels of daffodils and pansies at the door, and a crow on every sign.

The building has had several working lives before this one. It ground oil, then flour, then stored grain, and it was picked up and moved more than once along the way. The last move was the spectacular one.

In 1976 the entire warehouse came to Zaanse Schans by water. It was cut into seven sections, each roughly five metres long, eight metres high and fourteen metres wide, and floated here on fourteen deck barges. It has stood on this spot ever since, which means De Kraai turned fifty in April 2026, six days before I walked through the doors.

Ordering at the Counter

The system inside is self-service and signposted for people who do not read Dutch. A stack of trays sits by the door, the counter runs past soup and sandwiches and cakes, and a round yellow sign hanging over the middle of it sends pancake orders to the checkout counter. We ordered, waited, and carried ours outside.

An old green handcart stands in the middle of the room with the restaurant’s name painted on the side panel, loaded with children’s lunch boxes and packets, a hessian sack propped under the axle. Behind it the counter runs the length of the wall under hanging signs for soup and sandwiches.

The Carousel

The cooking happens in the open, on a machine worth standing still for. A ring of cast-iron pans sits in a rotating steel carousel, so a dozen pancakes cook at once and travel slowly round the circuit while they do.

Two of the staff worked it while I watched. One ladled batter onto a pan and swept it flat with a single pass, the other laid fillings straight onto the wet surface so they cook into the pancake instead of sitting on top of it. Nobody hurried. Nothing was fussed over.

Trays of prepared toppings wait at the end of the run in a steel counter: sliced fruit, bacon, chopped strawberries. The pans are seasoned black and the whole carousel sits under a broad steel hood.

Twenty Numbered Pancakes

The menu hangs above the till on a long board, Dutch down the left side and English down the right, numbered one to twenty.

The first nine are sweet and run from plain through Nutella, honey, cherry jam and apricot jam to stroopwafel with caramel sauce and banana with chocolate. Number seven is boerenjongens, raisins soaked in brandy, served with whipped cream. The savoury half is longer than I expected: apple with cinnamon sugar, apple and bacon, pineapple and cheese, bacon and cheese, ham and cheese, salami and cheese, then bacon, ham and cheese on their own, then bacon with onion and cheese, then chicken with cheese, rocket and pesto mayonnaise. Prices sat between twelve and fifteen and a half euros. A children’s box was ten, vanilla ice cream three fifty extra, and the day’s special, printed on the doors and on a banner over the till, was strawberries with cream.

The room it hangs in is long and low under dark beams, with rush-seated ladder-back chairs, pink gingham curtains and green enamel pendant lamps.

What a Dutch Pancake Actually Is

I grew up on Canadian pancakes. Small, thick, stacked three high, maple syrup over the top, eaten at breakfast. A pannenkoek is a different object wearing the same word. The batter is flour, eggs, milk and salt, and that list is missing the ingredient that makes a North American pancake rise. No baking powder, no baking soda. What arrives is thin and dense and as wide as the plate, and it is eaten as a meal rather than as breakfast.

We ordered two. Mine was number eleven, appel en spek. Rings of apple caramelised into the surface, two rashers of bacon laid across the middle, sugar dusted over the lot. Sweet and salt in the same mouthful, and the apple had gone soft and jammy where it met the pan.

The other was number thirteen, spek en kaas. Bacon cooked into the batter, three slices of cheese melted over the top, nothing else at all. It is a plain thing and it was the better of the two.

The Smuiger

Late in the afternoon I went back inside to look at the fireplace properly, because it is the best thing in the building.

The Zaan region had its own kind of chimney piece, called a smuiger. It is tiled from floor to ceiling, and the hood curves forward into the room at the top to throw as much heat as possible back at the people sitting in front of it. An iron plate set into the floor warmed their feet. A single smuiger took something in the region of three hundred hand-painted tiles, and most of them carried biblical scenes copied from engravings sold in Amsterdam.

De Kraai’s runs the full height of the room, hundreds of small scenes in blue on white, with a cast-iron column stove standing in front of it and a black crow perched on the lid. A painted milk churn sits to one side and a coal scuttle to the other.

The two larger tile pictures flanking it are the reason to cross the room. The left one shows a windmill. The right one shows something else entirely: sections of a large building out on the water, barges beneath them, a mill in the background. It is the move.

Outside, and a Visitor

The courtyard was full when we came back out. Every table taken, green umbrellas up, a queue at the neighbouring counter, people eating with coats still on because the sun was warm and the air was not.

Halfway through the pancakes we had company.

A duck walked out from among the table legs, stopped about a metre away and looked at us. Not nervous, not begging, simply present and entirely aware of what was on the plates.

She waited. She walked a slow half circle and waited again. Pancake is no good for a duck, so she got nothing from us, and after a while she went to try a different table with the same patient expression.

Bubbly Tips

• Getting there from Amsterdam. Zaanse Schans is about sixteen kilometres north-west of the city centre. The Sprinter from Amsterdam Centraal to Zaandijk Zaanse Schans takes around seventeen minutes, then it is a walk of ten to twenty minutes along the river. Bus 391 from the IJ side behind Centraal takes about forty minutes and stops at the village entrance. De Kraai sits by the car park, so it is the first thing you reach on foot from the bus and the last thing you pass on the way out.
• Know which service you want. Inside is self-service: trays by the door, and pancakes ordered separately at the checkout counter. The terrace runs table service from its own boards. Picking the wrong one is the easiest way to end up waiting for something that is not coming.
• Order one pancake, not two. They are twenty-nine centimetres across and dense rather than airy. One is a full lunch for an adult. If you are feeding a child, the children’s box at ten euros includes a small pancake.
• Go savoury at least once. Sweet pancakes are the safe order and the menu’s savoury half is where the tradition actually lives. Bacon and cheese is the plainest thing on the board and the one worth travelling for.
• Check your birth year before you order. De Kraai turned fifty in April 2026 and is giving a free pancake of choice to anyone born in 1975, 1976 or 1977, with ten per cent off for whoever is eating with them. Worth confirming it is still running when you go.
• The Zaanse Schans ticket includes a discount here. Ten per cent off, which is easy to forget about once you are standing at the till with a tray.
• Eat early or eat late. The kitchen opens at nine, earlier than most attractions on the site, and the courtyard fills hard between roughly noon and two when the tour buses are in. Coming at half past three means an empty table and better light.
• Go inside even if you eat outside. The smuiger is in the dining room and costs nothing to look at. Walk the length of the room, then come back and stand in front of the right-hand tile picture.
• Do not feed the ducks. They will come to your table and they are very good at it. Pancake, bread and anything sugary are bad for them, and the paving is not their habitat. Admire and decline.

Final Thoughts

The claim I was handed in the morning was that the pancakes are the best thing at Zaanse Schans. Having spent the day on clogs, cheese and windmills, I would put it slightly differently. The pancake is the best meal on the site, and the building it arrives in is worth as much as the meal. A warehouse cut into seven pieces and floated here on fourteen barges, with a picture of the crossing set into the fireplace in blue and white tile.

What I will actually remember is smaller than any of that. Number eleven, apple gone soft and jammy where it met the pan, bacon across the middle, eaten outside in late April sun with a duck standing a metre away, waiting with great dignity for something she was never going to get.

Until next time!

The post De Kraai, Zaanse Schans: Dutch Pancakes in an Old Warehouse appeared first on Bubbly Living.

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.