May 13, 2026

Leiden Travel Guide

Leiden’s canals and university charm offer Amsterdam’s soul without the crowds—plus the Pilgrims’ unexpected Dutch chapter.

Love Netherlands

Dear Netherlands,

There are two kinds of mornings in the Dutch spring. The kind where you cycle to the market and come home with warm cheese and rye bread and a handful of wild tulips. And the kind where it rains sideways for an hour, then the sun comes out and everything looks like a Vermeer. Today, if you’re lucky, is one of those mornings.

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Photo: Group portrait of the Varsity team of Njord (rowing subassoc via Wikimedia Commons…

In today’s email:

• Leiden Travel Guide
• At The Café — Café Locus Publicus — Rotterdam’s Belgian Beer Headquarters
• Around The Web — Delft — A Day in the Town That Made Vermeer, Groningen Travel Guide, Maastricht Travel Guide + more
• From Love Netherlands — Haarlem Travel Guide
• Dutch Food You Will Love — Raw Herring — The Dutch Test

Leiden Travel Guide

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The Rapenburg canal catches the afternoon light differently than the rest of Leiden ‘s waterways. The water reflects the gabled houses in near-perfect symmetry, and the willows lean in as though listening to the stories of the centuries that have unfolded along this particular stretch. It is here, locals insist without needing to consult any guidebook, that you find the most beautiful canal in the Netherlands. Not the grandest. Not the most famous. The most beautiful. There is a difference, and standing at the bridge with a cheese kroket in hand, it becomes clear what they mean. Leiden is the kind of Dutch city that reveals itself slowly—not in tourist moments, but in the texture of daily life. It sits just 35 minutes from Amsterdam by train, yet it remains wonderfully unrushed. A university town since 1575, founded by William of Orange as a reward for the city’s heroic defence during…

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At The Café

Café Locus Publicus — Rotterdam’s Belgian Beer Headquarters

Locus Publicus is a wood-panelled café on the Oostzeedijk in Rotterdam, with more than 200 beers on the menu and a chalkboard of rotating Belgian taps that changes every fortnight. Rotterdam is mostly modern after the 1940 bombing, but Locus is the city’s quiet exception — wooden floors, candles in glass jars, a cat that sleeps on the bar. Locals come for the Trappist selection and the kitchen’s straightforward menu of stoofpotten and good charcuterie boards. It’s the bar that proves Rotterdam has the same drinking culture as Amsterdam, just told quieter.

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Around The Web

From Love Netherlands

Haarlem Travel Guide

The light hits the façades of Grote Markt in that particular Dutch way: soft, almost silver, bouncing off the wetness of rain-darkened brick. It’s a Saturday morning in autumn, and the square isn’t empty—there are market stalls, cyclists, people carrying flowers and bread—but it doesn’t overwhelm. You can stand still here. You can look up at the ornate gable stones and watch the pigeons and actually think. This is Haarlem in essence: a place…

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Photo: Koor in de Grote of Sint Bavo-kerk te Haarlem ter gelegenhei via Wikimedia Commons…

Dutch Food You Will Love

Raw Herring — The Dutch Test

Every spring, a Dutch ritual unfolds on the streets of Amsterdam, The Hague, and Scheveningen. Herring stalls put out the year’s first catch — the Hollandse nieuwe — and locals queue to eat it raw, tipped back by the tail, sometimes on a soft white roll with onions. It tastes of the sea and of brine and, if you’re lucky, of nothing at all in the best possible way. Foreigners tend to grimace the first time. The Dutch laugh gently. “Three bites,” they say. “Then you love it forever.” They are usually right.

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