Last weekend, my boyfriend and I took a little right-before-Christmas trip to The Hague, in the Netherlands. We did some blog mentioning worthy stuff, so here we are. Den Haag turned out to be a cozy, compact city with very little must-sees, but lots of hyggelig cafés, coffee roasters and shops. If that sounds like your cup of tea, definitely read on.
Before we headed straight to the town of The Hague, don’t skip Museum Voorlinden. It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a cool museum. It’s a modern art museum that houses the biggest private collection of the Netherlands. We definitely experienced some ‘Hu?! That’s cool” moments. Our favourite pieces included Ron Mueck, Yayoi Kusama, and Marthine Tayou. It’s an very slick, cool lined museum right on the edge of a huge park that is ideal for walking. Best of both worlds!
In The Hague, we made Rariteitenkabinet our first stop. This little quirky shop was one of our favourites. It’s home to an unbelievable amount of stuffed animals, gems and weird collectioners objects. The man in the shop told us it was his passion run out of hand (only a bit). We didn’t know where to start or how to stop looking.
After a bit of walking around we needed some warming up, so we decided to stop by the Van Kleef Jenever distillery. It’s one of those places where it looks like time stood still. But here comes the cool part, you can choose to do a tasting there and they let you try any type of jenever for only 80 cents. Bargain! We went home with a bottle of the local ‘Haagsch Hopje’ flavour, a super sweet caramelly coffee flavour.
Worth strolling through, or if you’re into shopping, is the Passage. Another plus is you stay dry when it’s raining!
My boyfriend and I are both breakfast food lovers and I believe that if we could pick one type of meal to have every day, breakfast or brunch would be it. Needless to say, we take picking a place for breakfast very seriously. On the first day, we stopped at Bartine. Small, but great food. I’d recommend the sourdough bread with blueberries and thyme as well as the golden latte. Yum!
On our second day, we tried the Yoghurt Barn. It turns out it’s a chain of breakfast places that do lots of yoghurt dishes as well as frozen yoghurt. Another winner!
The best gifts can be found at De Bonte Koe – chocolade (best chocolate), Van Stockum Boekhandel, Paagman, American Book Centre (best book selections), Koffiebranderij Boon (best coffee), Free Beer(best specialty beer) and Inproc (best tea and coffee).
For lunch, we went to Instock. It’s a restaurant that has mostly vegetarian meals on its menu AND it uses food surplus from supermarkets and local bakeries to combat food waste. And did I mention the food was delicious? I’m still dreaming of the crispy chickpeas on top of my fully loaded vegetable sandwich. More yum! Top tip: make reservations in advance, because the place doesn’t have that many tables.
That’s it! We wanted to go to Scheveningen beach too, but the rain and wind decided otherwise. Next time!
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