You’ve Probably Walked Past Hundreds of Them Amsterdam has plenty of famous landmarks. There are seventeenth-century canal houses, church towers, crooked façades and bridges that have survived several centuries of bicycles, boats and questionable parking decisions. And then there is a small red-brown metal post. It stands barely a metre tall, carries three white crosses […]
What Happened to Amsterdam After Sunset? Imagine leaving an Amsterdam tavern after sunset in the seventeenth century. There are no glowing shop windows, no illuminated bridges reflected in the canals and no neat rows of streetlights guiding you home. The houses around you disappear into darkness, the streets are uneven and somewhere beside you is […]
Imagine Smelling Cinnamon for the First Time Walk through Amsterdam today and cinnamon hardly feels exotic. You smell it drifting from bakeries, find it dusted over apple pie and taste it in biscuits, pastries and winter treats. It belongs so naturally in Dutch cooking that it is easy to forget one rather important detail. Cinnamon […]
The Day Amsterdam Got a Miracle In 1345, Amsterdam was still a modest medieval town clustered around the Amstel when something happened in a house near the Kalverstraat that would change its fortunes. There were no grand canal houses yet, no Golden Age merchants and certainly no tourists queuing for stroopwafels. Amsterdam had trade, fishermen, […]
What if Amsterdam’s Most Important Building Wasn’t a Palace? When people think of Amsterdam’s most important landmarks, they usually picture the Royal Palace on Dam Square, the towering Westerkerk or the city’s elegant canal houses. Few would point to a sturdy medieval building standing quietly on the Nieuwmarkt. Yet if you had asked a merchant […]
Before Amsterdam Was Amsterdam… Every great city seems to have an origin story. Rome had Romulus and Remus. Venice rose from the lagoon. And Amsterdam? Well… Amsterdam may have started with two shipwrecked men, a barking dog and an awful lot of mud. At least, that’s the legend. Long before the canals, the merchant houses […]
From Exotic Bean to Amsterdam Obsession Walk through Amsterdam before 9 a.m. and you’ll smell it before you see it. Coffee drifting from canal-side cafés. Coffee being poured behind counters. Coffee clutched by cyclists navigating cobblestones with suspicious levels of confidence. It feels so naturally Amsterdam that you’d think coffee had always been here. It […]
Ask a Dutch person what counts as real comfort food, and chances are a potato will appear somewhere on the plate. Mashed, fried, boiled, baked, the Netherlands has been enthusiastically putting potatoes into nearly every meal for generations. Few things feel more traditionally Dutch than a large pan of stamppot on the table while rain […]
In Amsterdam, some landmarks shout for attention. The Westerkerk doesn’t have to. Locals simply call it de ouwe Wester (the old Wester) and it has been part of the city’s rhythm since 1631. Built as a Protestant church during Amsterdam’s Golden Age, it rose in a neighbourhood that was still finding its shape. Today, the […]