Author: Love Netherlands
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Rembrandt’s Leiden — Where the Dutch Golden Age Was Born
Image: Shutterstock Everyone knows that Rembrandt van Rijn was the greatest Dutch painter. Not everyone knows that before he became “Rembrandt of Amsterdam,” he was “Rembrandt of Leiden” — a miller’s son from a small university city 40 kilometres to the south, where he was born, apprenticed, and painted his first masterpieces before moving north…
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What Is a Bitterbal? A Field Guide to the Dutch Bar Snack You Need to Try
Image: Haberdoedas / Unsplash Walk into any Dutch brown café on a weekday evening and you’ll see, on half the tables, a little dish of small brown spheres with a pot of mustard beside them. Those are bitterballen, and if you leave the Netherlands without trying them you haven’t really been. What they actually are…
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Delft — The Small Dutch City That Taught Vermeer How to Paint Light
Image: Shutterstock Johannes Vermeer was born in Delft in 1632 and spent almost his entire life there. He left the city only a handful of times. He painted only about 35 pictures that we know of. And yet those 35 pictures changed how we think about light, windows, domestic quietness, and the slow unfolding of…
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Why the Dutch Take Their Coffee (and Their Stroopwafels) So Seriously
Image: Shutterstock The Netherlands is not Italy, where coffee is a ritual. It is not France, where coffee is an excuse to sit down. It is, oddly, somewhere in between — and it’s almost always served with a small, unassuming, extraordinary biscuit called a stroopwafel. The coffee The Dutch drink more coffee per person than…