Dutch street food, Part II: Everybody wins with Vlaamses frites

The lure of fried food

Other than the stands selling fish snacks and stroopwaffels, the Netherlands is full of little tiny snack bars that specialize in all things fried. Particularly amusing (to me) are the krokets - tubes of meat, cheese and potato filling covered in breadcrumbs and fried, like over-sized mozzarella sticks. I am filing this under "corn dog": comfort foods you love even though you know you should be disgusted by them.

Fit for a TGI Friday's appetizer menu

And of course, no fried food stand break would be complete without French fries. The Dutch call the real thing Vlaamses Frites (Flemish fries), which makes sense, as they are just like the fries you get in Belgium - except that instead of heaps of mayonnaise on top, you can opt for heaps of peanut sauce or spicy chili sauce (nods to the Indonesian influence in the Netherlands). Or you can go all out and opt for all of the above, at the same time - and with chopped onions. Personally, I'm filing that with "raw herring sandwich."

And this is with a "light" helping of mayonnaise

Variations on the kroket are available in automats on street corners and in train stations
- for some reason, it doesn't seem quite as appealing

The Amazing Museum Race

Having invested 45 euros last weekend in our museumkaarts, we set off yesterday to get our money's worth. This would be easier in Amsterdam than in the Hague, but we love a challenge.


The weather, however, did not cooperate: cold, wet, windy, miserable.

Cold, wet, and miserable in the Binnenhof courtyard

Could we burn through 32.50 worth of museum tickets in one afternoon? (The Rijksmuseum last weekend was a whopping 12.50.) Let the countdown begin...


1. The Mauritshuis


The granddaddy of Hague museums, and a gem of a world-class museum at that. This was originally the royal collection and is housed in an elegant 17th-century palace next to the Binnenhof. I appreciate that it is a smaller building -- by "palace," we mean a very nice mansion -- which makes it easier to appreciate the many golden oldies in the collection, like Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicoleas Tulp, Rubens' and Jan Brueghel the Elder's Garden of Eden, and a small room full of Holbein portraits, which were surprisingly lovely.

From www.ibiblio.org

I was most taken with Vermeer's View of Delft, which no reproduction prepared me for: in person, it is luminous and has an illusion of elegant precision that disappears on close inspection. Perhaps the crummy weather Vermeer painted makes it hard to reproduce in any way that conveys the beauty and balance of the original; it is also larger than I expected.



Unfortunately, a floor of the Mauritshuis was closed, which meant they were heavily discounting tickets. So that was only 5.25 down: 27.25 euros to go.



2. Prince Willem V Gallery


The oldest public art museum in the Netherlands, this gallery just reopened in its original home in the old town gate on the other side of the Binnenhof. The collection is shared with the Mauritshuis, where all the most important paintings from the original collection are now housed.

They have reconstructed the feel of the original gallery, with paintings jigsawed together to cover every inch of wall space from floor to ceiling -- an impressive experience, but it makes it hard to appreciate the art hung up in the dark recesses of the ceiling. Then again, my experience was marred when I was yelled at by a guard for leaning in too close to a picture.

The adjoining prison/torture musuem provides tours of the less pleasant history of the old gate, but it involved sitting through another hour-long tour in Dutch. Having had that experience (with limited success), we bailed. So only another 5 Euros down.

3. Panorama Mesdag


This was high on my list because of the nonsensical descriptions in the guidebooks: who would pay 6.50 euros (which is like $20 by today's exchange rate) to "stand in the center of this 360-degree painting of nearby Schevningen in the 1880s, with a 3-D, sandy beach foreground"?*

A wide-angle view of the panorama (from the web)

Turns out it's pretty cool. Mesdag was a famous painter of seascapes back in the late 1800s, when panoramas were the most realistic recreations of places and events possible before the advent of the moving picture. The painting of the Hague's beach town suburb fills a giant circular building, the center of which is wonderfully cheesy: you stand on an elevated wooden gazebo in the middle and look out at the painting across a "real" sandy dune, planted cheekily with beach chairs, scraps of nets, sea grass, and other beach refuse.

The panorama from the outside, to give a sense of scale

But what surprised me most was how interesting the rest of the experience was. I really enjoyed the few additional galleries of Mesdag's paintings and other artwork from the "Hague school." There's also a little cafe under the gazebo where you can peek behind the curtain, so to speak, at the structural supports for the panorma and watch a 20-minute video on its creation and on the painstaking 10-year renovation in the 1990s.

Worth 6.50? Mmmm, maybe on a day with a 50% discount. But at least it takes us down to 15.75...

* Rick Steves' Amsterdam, Bruges & Brussels

4. Museum Meermanno/Huis von het boek (House of the Book)


How to explain the book museum? It is based around the idiosyncratic collecting obsessions of the Baron van Westreenen, in whose 18th century mansion the musem is housed. So there are illuminated medieval manuscripts galore and limited edition books that are themselves pieces of art, but also Greek and Egyptian antiquities (including a mummified cat), the Baron's coin collection, some religious icons from the Middle Ages, displays on fonts and type setting, and two gardens -- one a classical pleasure garden, the other full of giant letters.

The letter garden at the House of the Book

Lyza would love it here, but by this point in the cold, wet afternoon, it was all a little too surreal for us...

Ticket: 4 Euros.

Final Tally:

5 hours of museum-ing later, and we still had 11.75 Euros to go {{wah wah waaaaaah}}.

To be continued?

De Boomhut

I have a new love affair. Mom and Lyza will understand: it's with a children's book. And it's Dutch.

We were in Amsterdam on Sunday and invested in a pair of museumkaarts: 45 euros for access (theoretically) to over 400 Dutch museums. (Sounds like a challenge to us.) We broke it in on the Rijksmuseum - Holland's equivalent of the National Gallery.

The Rijksmuseum had a nice little exhibition on recent picture books. De Boomhut - which means "tree house" but is an awesome word in its own right - is a story with no words. Ronald Tolman made an etching of a tree with a house, and engraved it on a series of canvases, which he then sent to his daughter Marije, who drew in the animals and the weather and other details. For me, the book is a story of a growing friendship between two bears over the course of a day, and their delight in the wonder of flamingos and friendship and snow. (I've seen speculation online that the book is really about global warming, but I rather think that cheapens it - why does it have to have a message, other than the joy of seeing the world through a child's eyes?)

I haven't been able to find the book on Amazon, which is a shame, since a book this beautiful deserves a wider audience.


(Illustrations copied from http://elpetittresor.blogspot.com/2010/09/de-boomhut.html)

Dutch street food: Jeff 1, Maggie 0

With dueling pocket change today, Jeff and I tried out two standbys of the Dutch street food scene: a raw herring sandwich and a waffle sandwich. Guess which one won.

Evidently raw herring is the Netherlands' national food. That's not necessarily a ringing endorsement: see, e.g., Iceland's rotten shark. Here's where I went wrong: walking up to a cart full of fish snacks and asking for what most people get, in a country where even the locals joke about the bad local cuisine. Raw herring has a much stronger - by which I mean, fishier - taste than any other raw fish I have ever tried.

Better plan: go where the lines are, in particular the lines with children. The carts that sell stroopwafels (at least the ones that make them on the spot) can fill an entire city street with the smell of dessert. "Syrup waffles" are thin, crisp, waffle-like cookies with a layer of caramel sauce sandwiched in between. Jeff was kind enough to spare me a few bites, so I could try to cover up my herring breath.

[We're working on some illustrative photos, even if it means I have to try another raw fish sandwich: stay tuned.]

A Crash Course in Crazy Dutch Politics

Our second night in the city, we were wandering off to find a Belgian beer after dinner when we noticed a bit of a brouhaha across the street at the Binnenhof, the Dutch parliament.

Coming from DC, we are often struck by how easy it is to just walk up to the seats of power in this capitol-but-not-the-capitol city - or even to live right on top of them. The Binnenhof is a prime example. The Dutch parliament is a beautiful complex of old and modern buildings, fronted by a moat-like lake and built around a courtyard with the 13th-century Ridderzaal - Knight's Hall - in the middle. The Dutch think nothing of using this courtyard as a pedestrian and bicycling thoroughfare.

Tuesday night there were several TV news vans parked outside the Binnenhof and a crowd of people standing behind metal barricades in the courtyard, cameras at the ready. Clearly someone important was about to come out.

Windows and Balconies

The weather has been unseasonably sunny and "warm" (in the 60s), allowing us to make use of our balcony before winter sets in.

Everyone here seems to have a balcony, just like how every building here seems to have big windows - and a lot of them. It makes me nervous for winter, if the pursuit of every ray of light is so deeply institutionalized in the culture.

Photo Ops in Delft

Feeling restless after a week in the Hague, we ventured this Sunday to Delft -- all of a twenty minute tram ride away. Indeed, Delft is so close to -- and so much prettier than -- the Hague, Rick Steves recommends that tourists camp out in Delft and only venture into the Hague for short periods of time.

To be honest, Delft's postcard-perfect beauty was rather lost on me: after only a week in the Netherlands, I might already be canal'd out. But I did get the obligatory photo with Hugo Grotius, father of international law:

Other famous Delftians include Vermeer, who spent his whole life in Delft (though none of his paintings currently reside there), and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who invented the microscope and discovered bacteria. Coincidentally, Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer were born the same year, but Leeuwenhoek lived more than twice as long - which just goes to show, we should all be scientists (or at least, driven by our curiousity).

Another View of Delft, and Grotius