Articles tagged with "Netherlands"
The Netherlands suits an older traveler unusually well: everything is close together, nothing is uphill, the trains are reliable and the standard of care is high. The trade offs are specific rather than general, and they are about surfaces, bicycles and water rather than about distance or altitude.
The Netherlands has real advantages for travelers with mobility, hearing or visual needs: no hills, dense public transport and modern buildings that are built to be used. It also has four specific obstacles that flatness does not solve, and a historic center that was built for a different body.…
Dutch ancestry research is more tractable than most, because the Netherlands has kept civil registration since 1811 and church registers for centuries before it, and because a great deal of it is indexed and online. This guide covers where the records are, what the main emigration waves were, and…
The Dutch year has two dates worth planning around and both are fixed: King's Day on 27 April, which is the largest street party in the country, and Sinterklaas on 5 December, which is a family occasion rather than a spectacle. Everything else either moves with Easter or moves with the weather, and…
Dutch social life runs on directness, equality and appointments, and all three are easy to misread as coldness on a first visit. The practical etiquette here is mostly about traffic, punctuality and knowing that the country famous for tolerance has quite specific rules about where tolerated things…
Dutch food is straightforward, dairy centered and much better than its reputation, and the most interesting eating in the country is not strictly Dutch at all: Indonesian food is a permanent part of the national table. Markets are where to start. There is one customs rule that catches people on the…
The Netherlands is an easy country to travel in and a specific one to prepare for. Four things are worth reading before you go: you must be able to show identification from the age of fourteen, cannabis is tolerated rather than legal and the difference can reach you in an airport, Amsterdam has an…
The Netherlands is small, dense and superbly connected, so you almost certainly do not need a car. Trains reach nearly everything, bicycles are genuine transport rather than recreation, and the one thing to understand before you step off a curb is that cyclists and mopeds have right of way over…
Packing for the Netherlands is decided by four things: weather that changes inside a day, wind with nothing to break it, streets made of brick and cobble, and a legal requirement to be able to show identification from the age of fourteen. Get those right and the rest is ordinary city packing.
The Netherlands uses the euro and is one of the most card driven countries in Europe, which produces a specific and common problem: plenty of Dutch shops, markets and machines take debit cards but not credit cards. That is the thing to plan for. There is one declaration threshold, and there are…