Windmills, wooden shoes, cheese, tulips, and lots of bicycles:
These images conjure up the traditional view of the Netherlands, a.k.a. Holland. (While North and South Holland are just two of the country’s 12 provinces, they’re so dominant that people use the names Holland and the Netherlands interchangeably.) But dig deeper and you will discover that the country also has high-tech culture, far-out architecture, and no-nonsense people with a global perspective. The Dutch generally speak English, pride themselves on their frankness, and like to split the bill. As connoisseurs of world culture, they appreciate Rembrandt paintings, Indonesian cuisine, and the latest French films, but with a non-snooty, blue-jeans attitude. The capital, Amsterdam, is a laboratory of progressive living, bottled inside Europe’s most 17th-century city. Like Venice, this city is a patchwork quilt of canal-bordered islands, anchored upon millions of wooden pilings. But unlike its dwelling-in-the-past cousin, Amsterdam sees itself as a city of the future, built on good living, cosy cafés, great art, street-corner jazz, and a spirit of live-and-let-live.
Because the Netherlands is compact and flat, it’s easy to do day trips from Amsterdam. The slick, efficient train system gets you anywhere in just hours. Approach the Netherlands as an ethnologist observing a fascinating and unique culture. A stroll through any neighbourhood is rewarded with things that are commonplace here but rarely found elsewhere.Carillons chime quaintly in neighbourhoods selling sex, as young professionals smoke pot with impunity next to old ladies in bonnets selling flowers. Truly, dutch society is the most tolerant in the world, for many years now, they have decriminalised soft drugs, prostitution, etc. The Dutch society and government feel that either accept alternative lifestyles or build more prisons, interestingly the per capita drug abuse and sex crime is abysmally low in the Netherlands than in many developed countries. That’s what the dutch call ‘Pragmatic Harm Reduction’. While in Amsterdam and the Hague, we visited many places, did a canal cruise, and explored the city and its museums Amsterdam is a treasure house of the works of some of the world’s most famous artists, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and many more.Madurodam is a miniature park and a major tourist attraction in The Hague, Netherlands. The park is located in the Scheveningen district of the city and features miniature 1:25 scale model replicas of the most famous Dutch castles, industrial projects and public buildings.Guests are treated to a trip through the history of the country and its famous buildings. Not only that, but they can also enjoy a hands-on experience while exploring the park.The windmills were used to pump the polders dry. An area once the merciless sea is now dotted with tranquil towns.
Many of the residents here are older than the land they live on, which was reclaimed in the 1960s. All this technological tinkering with nature has prompted a popular local saying: “God made the Earth, but the Dutch made Holland.The Netherlands’ flat land makes it a biker’s dream. And in Amsterdam, bikes are by far the smartest way to travel. Everyone—bank managers, students, pizza delivery boys, and police—uses bikes to get around town.Wooden shoes have become a Dutch cliché—a symbol of the low-lying Netherlands’ past. Even their name, Klompen (yes, the singular is Klomp), has fun and oh-so-Dutch ring to it.The Netherlands is a developed nation, the average per capita income of the Dutch is higher than the US. With a happy and tourist-friendly atmosphere. this is a country one must visit.
-By Ruchi Jain
