A voyage to the Nether regions -- Netherlands 2025

I just got back from a trip to the Netherlands. I was there for a work trip, but I decided to stay a few extra days after the work part was over. Before booking my flights, I was a little on the fence about staying longer. I’d miss my wife and dog and friends and I like my day to day life. But now that I went, it’s such a no brainer. Four days back home passes in the blink of an eye and I can’t tell you a week later what I did in those four days, while the four days abroad are so full of novelty that they feel like a mini lifetime.

With some places, you know you’re going to love them so it’s no surprise when you do, and other times you think you’ll like a place and it ends up disappointing. I honestly wasn’t expecting to like the Netherlands that much, but it ended up surprising me and I had a really good time.

Anyway, enough talk. Let’s look at some pics!

The view exiting Amsterdam Centraal station:

You immediately notice that EVERYONE is biking:

and the bikes are chained up EVERYWHERE:

Very common to see people biking with neither hands on the handlebars:

The bike culture is awesome. I’ll save my thoughts on it for a future post though, where I can ramble to my heart’s content.

Super cute canals everywhere:

I biked around with a few coworkers my first day. Their trash receptacles have a special pizza slot!

Snorfiesters… verboden! What a silly language.

We stopped by a street art museum housed in an old factory. Some of it was cool, but lots were this really generic style of street art/graffiti/whatever that I think is completely overdone and pretty boring; it feels like the Nickelback of art. The paintings at the top left and bottom right are two examples of it:

I strongly associate this style with a city saying they have a “really cool district with lots of cool street art”.

Anyway, we got a couple ferries that day, which are frequent and free, and filled with bikes:

One night my work hired a canal cruise boat with a dinner buffet, which was lots of fun. At night the canals get lit up and it’s very cute:

A few coworkers and I wanted a dessert, so we stopped at some random place on google maps with a good rating. When we got there, there was a really long line:

It turns out they make a single type of cookie! I’m impressed by the confidence, so I had to try it. And it was very good! A chocolate cookie with white chocolate chips, super optimized.

After my work trip, I spent a couple days in Den Haag, or as you might know it, the Hague :P I took one of the many cheap, fast, convenient trains there.

Some of the stations on the way were really pretty, and you can tell that they used to take lots of pride in their design:

Biking really is ubiquitous there, and there are HUGE bike parking lots outside of every station:

I knew the Netherlands was flat, but it’s… really flat:

The first thing I did in the Hague was go to Madurodam, which is… I dunno, a theme park, kind of? A temple to infrastructure? You’ll see. I rented a bike off the “Donkey Republic” app, and the bike ride there was easy and pretty:

Madurodam. I can’t state how cool it was. It has miniatures of a million things in the Netherlands, especially around infrastructure and civil engineering:

But most of the things are moving around on their own, like those boats, or are something you can control! Here are some of those movable barriers:

Incredibly well done:

Miniatures of neighborhoods and famous buildings:

with real canals of course:

The Rijks (more on that later!):

The Scheepvaartmuseum, or as you might know it, the “maritime museum”:

This was one of my very favorite things. There was a coin or card operated thing next to a miniature of a factory, saying you could get a pair of clogs for two euros. I didn’t see how but I was curious, so I tapped my card, and…

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! TINY CLOGS! WITH MADURODAM ON THEM! AND THE TRUCK DRIVES UP TO YOU TO PICK THEM UP!

You might notice that the truck isn’t on any visible track. I’m guessing they have a wire under the surface and it’s doing some path following, but it must be pretty damn well designed to do it so consistently and rarely get stuck. They used this trick several times in different places, and sometimes had it going along some fairly narrow path between obstacles!

You could control that plunger thing, move in in the XYZ directions, and activate the suction, to move the cargo containers onto and off of the ship:

There was a button you could press to start a real fire on that oil tanker you can see, and then you could activate pumps and aim the firehoses of two other ships to put out the fire, as you can see this kid doing:

I’m leaving out a million other cool things here, but definitely go if you get the chance! Possibly my favorite thing the whole trip.

I went to the beach by the Hague one day. Despite being November, there were actually a ton of people out, wake boarding, walking their dogs, or running between a beach sauna and jumping in the water:

The Netherlands actually has great food! It’s just… not the Dutch food. The good food is from places they colonized in the past. So I was eating food from those places as often as I could, since they’re also cuisines that aren’t as common back home.

Surinamese:

Indonesian (my favorite meal there):

that sampler plate included beef Rendang (🤤), jackfruit curry, a coconut spinach cream thing, some really good tempeh, the spicy hard boiled egg, and… dogfruit! I hadn’t ever had it before, but I really liked the texture of it.

Nasi Goreng, Indonesian fried rice, delicious:

What sort of dog is this?

I went to the MC Escher museum in the Hague, which I highly recommend. I didn’t realize that before the stuff he’s more famous for, he mostly did landscapes and similar, mostly of Italy, where he spent a lot of time:

and more straightforward just very cool/realistic prints:

but of course, the stuff he’s famous for is famous for a reason:

I had of course seen the tessellations he’s famous for like the one above, but I hadn’t before seen the one below, where none of the shapes are repeated:

and of course, ya gotta show Crazy Stairs:

a very cute birth announcement he made for his son:

Next I went to Utrecht for a day. It’s super cute and cozy. It also has canals like Amsterdam, but unlike Amsterdam, there are walkways right down next to the canals, and mini streets and restaurants you can go into, under street level:

Then back to Amsterdam for the last couple days. Here’s the other side of Amsterdam Centraal:

That’s, uhh… slightly nicer than South Station in Boston.

The Maritime museum:

hey look! it’s the thing from Madurodam, with the ship.

the lines across the glass roof are inspired by the lines on old maritime navigation maps:

The museum has old paintings of course, but also many physical artifacts and stuff. There was this awesome old clock:

which you can see the movement of here:

and you can go aboard the replica ship you can see docked next to the museum in the pics above, which was built in the 90s to match one of the old style ships:

Memories of Obra Dinn!

They also had a big gallery of miniature ships, through the ages:

One decent Dutch food: the friets (or as you might know them, fries :P ).

Due to my poor planning, I ended up having to see both the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum on my last day. This meant I spent about 8 hours in museums that day, and my feet were pretty sore by the end. I went to the Rijks first, then the Van Gogh, after lunch.

They’re restoring what’s definitely the Rijk’s most famous painting, the Night Watch:

This is the way chess was meant to be played:

The Rijks was awesome. The architecture is great, and nearly every piece had a good placard with context and history. Something I really liked that they did was, for some of the more famous pieces, they have these placemat-sized info cards, with bubbles highlighting interesting aspects of the painting and historical notes.

The museum also has a crazy research library:

Next, the Van Gogh museum:

“The crab lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”

They had a special exhibit on the Roulins, the family that Van Gogh painted many portraits of. I saw two paintings that looked familiar…

hah! I knew it. But I didn’t know that the one of Mrs. Roulin was actually the 5th and final copy! Seeing the others, the MFA one is definitely the best.

My feelings on the Van Gogh museum were mixed, though. The art is of course great, and they did a good job explaining his biography as you progress through the museum. However… the actual experience of it was pretty offputting. Because Van Gogh is plausibly the most famous painter (top 5 anyway) most people know of and has some mega iconic pieces, it attracts a ton of influencer-types who are basically there to pose next to the painting and get their picture taken. I can’t tell you how many times I saw this scene:

I’m not bothered by other people not enjoying it the way I think they’re supposed to or something, but whenever I tried looking at any painting for more than 10 seconds, it’d get interrupted by people sticking their phones between me and the painting to take a picture of it. So, it just made it kind of hard for me to enjoy it myself.

I saw many people just basically taking a pic of every single painting. Why?? It’s… honestly a little baffling to me. I think there are a few reasons it can make sense to take a pic of a painting: 1) you think you might not be able to find it online later, 2) you want to remember the name or some aspect of it, 3) you want to send it to someone in that moment. But it’s certainly going to be worse quality than any picture of it you can find online, and those reasons can’t be why they’re doing it for all the paintings. It’s really a puzzler to me.

Rambling

Here are just some random handwavy thoughts and observations:

The Netherlands feels like a country punching way above their weight. They don’t really have any inherent natural resources as far as I know, and geographically it’s a bunch of lowland delta marsh. Yet historically, they’ve had a really outsized cultural and scientific impact, and a pretty damn successful empire, for such a tiny place with a lot stacked against it.

However, there are many countries who had lots of success in the past, but are kind of resting on their laurels now and seem to be dying a slow death. So you might think the Netherlands fits this profile, but they’re also doing really well today! They have some major tech/other companies (most obviously ASML) that are known internationally, and I really get an impression that the place is on a positive trajectory.

It seems like there are countries where it’s probably lots of fun to be young, but the economic/career prospects aren’t great, and also countries with the opposite (opportunity but crushing work expectations). But the Netherlands seems like it somehow kind of has both? Which is an impressive needle to thread.

I always think historical cultural pride is kind of a strange concept. I.e., why should I be proud of accomplishments that distant ancestors who I’ve never met did? But I kind of get it with the Netherlands, because it feels like it’s something that they continue to do. That really shone through to me through Madurodam, because it felt like an implicit statement of “we took this lousy place and through effort and ingenuity made it pretty nice, but we’ll always have to work to keep it nice.”

Anyway, that’s all. I had a great time in the Netherlands and would love to go back someday!