In November, my friend Jordan (from MIT) and I went to the Netherlands to visit our other MIT friend, Chandler, for two weeks. She’s currently getting her master’s in Industrial Design at TU Delft. We spent our nights at Chandler’s place (very reminiscent of East Campus) and took day trips to different cities. Here’s a summary of what we did, saw and (most importantly) ate.
Why I love the Netherlands
First off, the Netherlands is an awesome country. Everyone is really liberal and open, but also extremely friendly. Everyone has terrific English and I never felt uncomfortable for not knowing Dutch. In the Netherlands, bikes rule the road. There are bike paths everywhere in the city and even between cities. There are specific traffic lights just for bikes, and you often see more people biking than driving on any given day. People often carry passengers on the racks over the back wheel, and I even tried this at one point - you kind of have to get on the bike after it’s already moving. Finally, the food and beer is amazing. Most of my meals during the trip consisted of three major food groups: cheese, beer and chocolate. Needless to say, I had a nice surprise when I came home and realized I no longer fit into my tight jeans.
Delft
Delft (where Chandler lives) is a cute little town sandwiched between Den Haag and Rotterdam, and full of students and canals. There’s an awesome market in the center of town twice a week, where you can get cheap clothes, licorice, chocolate, cheese, fruit and a vegetable that looks like a fractal (see pictures). We also got to visit some of the nice cafes (read: bars) in town.
My favorite one was called Locus Publicus, and had hundreds of beers on tap. When we first sat down it was drizzling a bit, but soon it was pouring and the trees outside were almost doubling over from the wind. So we made the safe decision and stayed for several rounds. The best part was the ruggedly handsome bartender who sat down at our table to help us choose the perfect beer. I started out with a really sour Oude Gueze and finished with a nice sweet one called Barbar, which apparently you can get in the U.S.
We had a couple other incidents of interesting weather during our trip, including running along a canal in a storm which would alternate between periods of zero precipitation and intense, face-burning hail which would last for about 3 minutes. But mostly it was just drizzling all day or clear.
Den Haag, Rotterdam and Utrecht
Other than hanging out in Delft, we also visited Den Haag, Rotterdam and Utrecht by train and bike. The train system in the Netherlands is really good, but on a few occasions we rented bikes and toured the countryside. Our first bike trip (to Rotterdam) was a bit of a disaster. Partly because we were constantly getting lost, and partly because my back-pedal brake bike was really freaking me out. I had to keep jumping off of my seat to stop and was also having issues starting. I’m sure most passers-by thought I’d never rode a bike before. But it was still fun, and we saw a lot of canals and sheep. For our second trip, we went to Den Haag and stopped by the beach at Scheveningen (see pic). We had lunch in this cute little café which was in the middle of the road in a residential area. I had a toastie (toasted sandwich, usually involving cheese), and a hot chocomel (hot chocolate taken to the next level).
We returned to Den Haag by train to catch a couple museums, and the highlight was the temporary M.C. Escher museum at the Het Palais. The first floor of the exhibit contained a lot of his drawings and black and white block prints. The second floor housed his optical illusion themed prints. My favorites were the intersecting planes and the one with an evil fish and an innocent bird. The last floor had an exhibit were you could further examine Escher’s optical illusions with weird lenses and mirrors and such. The building itself was pretty cool too, and each room had a chandelier in the shape of something else (like a spider or a saxophone).
We also saw some pretty interesting museums in Utrecht. We got museum cards (which are pricey) in Den Haag and wanted to get our money’s worth, so we went to several very unconventional museums which took the card. The first was the Universitaat museum, which had old-fashioned dental instruments and skeletons from seriously deformed fetuses and adults. It was pretty interesting, but made me kind of uncomfortable. Then we went to a museum which was a replica of a grocery store from the early 1900s, but we only got to stay for about 30 seconds, because we arrived when they were closing (as always, we got lost). Finally, after getting lost again, we went to a water museum. It was housed in an old water tower and each floor of the tower had a different exhibit about either the history of the tower or something about water purification. For the record, the maps in the Netherlands lonely planet guide are really bad.
For dinner in Utrecht, we went to a converted banquet hall turned bar and restaurant that brews its own beer. We started with an appetizer of shrimp wrapped in phyllo and then deep fried and served with sweet chili sauce. (I actually tried recreating this when I got home and it worked really well. It definitely helped that my mom has a restaurant quality deep-fryer.) Then I had a crazy salad with lots of cheese and pears and caramelized pecans. I think Jordan had a salad with smoked salmon.
Brussels and Antwerp
The highlight of the whole trip was our weekend expedition to Brussels (with both Jordan and Chandler). It kind of started in disaster, as the map we had for our hotel showed it in a completely different part of the city than it actually was. We were wandering around lost and cold for about an hour or two before we figured out what was wrong. At least it wasn’t raining. But the hotel turned out to be amazing. I just booked the cheapest thing I found online and it happened to be a business hotel that was having a weekend special. We each got our own bed in a really nice room for slightly less than the cost of a hostel.
Our first day in Brussels we mostly wandered around the city: visited the Jeu de Balle flea market, bought some fancy Belgian chocolates and walked around the St. Gery area looking at the comic strip murals (see picture). The best part was our visit to the Cantillon brewery. For 5 euro, they take you on a tour of the brewery, tell you all about the making of lambic and gueze beer and give you a glass of a beer of your choosing.
For dinner we went to a traditional, fancy Belgian restaurant in St. Gery. We started out with an aperitif that was some sort of sweet, light beer. It was heaven. Then we shared an appetizer of mussels (one of the main pillars of Belgian food) cooked in an escargot sauce (garlic and butter). Also extremely delicious. For my main course, I had carbonnade flamande (beef stew cooked in beer) served with fries, which was also good, but nothing close to the mussels.
That night we tried hitting up some of the “hot” Brussels clubs and they were mostly creepy and lame. We found one cool bar called zebra which had a decent DJ and good drinks, but it only went downhill after that. First we went to one of the large dance clubs and immediately left. Then when I heard a Depeche Mode song coming from another bar, I got really excited and my friends humored me, so we went in. It was an Irish pub that was filled almost entirely with Americans. On the first floor, the DJ was playing mostly old rock songs to which some very drunk tourists were dancing to extremely enthusiastically. There was one really creepy dude who was dancing like there were little invisible elves crawling all over him and tasing him every couple of seconds. It required great self control to contain my laughter.
The next morning, we had breakfast at an ice cream place that had exciting flavors like thyme and Spekuloos (a kind of Dutch cookie that tastes like cinnamon). We then took a brief tour of some of the art deco architecture around where we were staying (see pictures). Our final destination in Brussels was the Musee des Beaux Arts. When we got there, we found out that it was closed for the day because it was apparently some kind of national holiday. I was really upset until I had a sugar coated waffle, and then I was actually pretty happy.
Since we had the whole afternoon left, we decided to stop over in Antwerp. The main cathedral contains four huge Reubens and I really wanted to catch a glimpse before they closed. We arrived at the train station and all but ran to the cathedral and arrived two minutes before closing, but the woman at the entrance was really nice and said we could stay for a half hour. It was a beautiful cathedral and so cool to see paintings in the space for which they were actually intended. Afterwards, we walked around the main square, which contains a statue of a man standing on top of a dead giant and flinging the giant’s hand into the air. Apparently in the summertime, water spurts from the severed part of the hand. We also ate at the best fries place in Antwerp (according to Chandler), which was indeed delicious. We had fries quite often during our trip and found that they are really good with mayo (especially curry-flavored mayo). The reason that Americans find that concept so gross is because our mayo is really bad and greasy whereas theirs is creamy and delicious. We finished off our visit at a Champagne bar, and ate more food.
Final weekend
One of the best parts of our trip was the people we met in the Netherlands, especially Chandler’s housemates. They were all very friendly and open and made us feel completely at home staying in Chandler’s room. The last Friday of our stay, we went to a party at another student living group. The address of that apartment was ‘L’, so the theme of the party was “L’ell’s Angels”. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to dress up for a party, the three of us donned matching biker costumes, and everyone from Chandler’s house went to the party together in, appropriately, a gang of bicycles. The hosting girls were all dressed up as biker chicks and the boys as loin-cloth clad angels, and they painted all the walls to fit with the party theme. Beer was flowing aplenty, the party was a blast and we headed home at about 5am.
We spent our last day with Chandler at the gigantic market in Rotterdam, getting supplies for dinner that night. I made fruit and veggie sushi (one with tamago, cucumber and shitakes and another with strawberry, kiwi and mango), which we had with raw shrimp and oysters.
On Sunday, we left for Amsterdam and spent most of the day at museums. We started at the Van Gogh museum, which had a special exhibit on Barcelona at the turn of the 20th century. My favorite part was the contemporary posters advertising art exhibitions and Montmatre clubs. The permanent collection was also fabulous, containing Van Gogh paintings from throughout the stages in his career, and works by contemporary artists.
Next, we stopped by the Rembrandt House Museum on the way to the Stedilijk museum. The latter had a large Andy Warhol exhibit, which featured many of his movies and television work. For our final meal in the Netherlands we went to the Pancake Bakery, a fabulous restaurant that serves both sweet and savory Dutch pancakes (crepes). Jordan and I split two pancakes, the first with deer, cabbage and stewed pears, which was actually really fantastic, and the second with caramelized apples and cinnamon ice cream.
It was pretty hard to leave and I actually considered staying and sleeping on Chandler’s floor. But in the end, I decided to come home and just make due with the severely limited and extremely expensive selection of Belgian beers you can get in the U.S. At least I have the Cheese Store of Silverlake.
