Today is our first full day in Den Bosch. Our hotel wants 18 euro apiece for breakfast, so we opt instead to try a local restaurant: Crème. We head that direction and in the process wander through the Saturday market in the main square. They have everything and they seem to be here for the locals, not for tourists. Everything looks awesome and yummy. But we’re going to breakfast so we keep our wallets in our pockets.
Crème lives up to its billing. Most of us have scrambled eggs with cheese and bacon on local wheat bread. Everything, including the coffee, is delicious. I don’t think of the Dutch as being famous for healthy/tasty bread, but everything we’ve had points in that direction. Mike has a Turkish dish made with sautéed and spiced onions and peppers, eggs and cheese. The Turkish and middle eastern influence is obvious when you see some of the ‘locals’, but also in the restaurants. We’re finding this to everyone’s advantage. Mike lets us sample his breakfast. It’s scrumptious. We’re seeing a pattern here with all the food. People keep asking us why we’re going to these smaller Dutch cities and we need to be asking why they’re keeping them such a secret!
We digest by walking around. Much of the city is, effectively, pedestrian/bike zones. If you have cause to have a vehicle in the lovely inner city, you have the ability to do that. So you’ll occasionally see a taxi bringing people with lots of luggage, or a delivery truck, but those are very rare. This is all controlled not by signs and fines, but by pistons that quietly block a road or allow ingress by allowed vehicles. It works well and results in a lovely, big place to stroll. It’s very clean, without constant traffic by diesel and internal combustion engines. There are scooters, but most are electric. Such a lovely society.
Artist Hieronymus Bosch wasn’t born that way. At least he wasn’t born with the last name of Bosch. Whether he was born with the disturbing visions of earth and the hereafter, we’ll never know. He was born Jheronimus van Aken and his first name got adjusted by foreigners for ease of spelling and I guess he took the Bosch so patrons could find him more easily, like having a good email address today.
There is quite a museum in Den Bosch devoted to the artist. The museum doesn’t have any actual works by Bosch, but they have all his works reproduced and, as has been done for da Vinci, many of Bosch’s ideas have been rendered in three dimensions. They’re somewhere between disturbing and cuddly. We spend a surprising amount of time studying the works of Hieronymus and take untold numbers of pictures. Finally it’s time to push on, process what we just saw, and (of course) eat.
We read many good things about a restaurant named Gusto. We find it but it’s apparently already been found. The many seats inside and out are already occupied. We’re told we could have a table for four in an hour, so we beg off. We’ll try another day. Instead we pick a random spot on a corner facing the market square. Heineken, onion soups and a salad were good enough for the main course. Dessert? Well the city is famous for their Bosch Ballen. If you know the French Profiterole it’s like that, but with whipped cream inside, larger size and dipped in chocolate. We should order one but get two. They look good and are better than that. They’re sold everywhere and we now know why. Yum!
After lunch we ponder our future (meals, travel) as we so often do. We consult Apple Maps for how long our trip to Giethoorn will be tomorrow. It’s not bad but the return trip, the next day, to Amsterdam will be unacceptably long and arduous. We cancel our hotel in Giethoorn and extend our stay in our new ‘next city’ Zwolle. Figuring out how to call another city in Holland from a US cell phone isn’t easy. You invariably get through to a Dutch-speaking robot who is either telling you that you’ve reached a number that’s no longer in service, OR that your call is important to them and that we should hold. We eventually opt for the latter meaning and are rewarded for our patience. It turns out we left this switch too late and there will be a penalty, but it’s only 30 euros a room, a price we’re willing to pay for avoiding such pain. Giethoorn will have to wait for a future trip.
Karen did a lot of the planning for our eight week trip, but our friends Mike and Liz, with whom we’re currently traveling, found (and got us reservations for) most of the great restaurants we’re eating at here in the Netherlands. And tonight’s place was high on our list of favorites. It’s billed as a “Gastro Bar.” In fact, that’s it’s name. Upon walking in there appears to be seating maybe for a dozen, but down (a lot of) stairs there’s a huge cavernous room with much more seating. The room is huge and the ceiling is very tall, which is odd for a basement. Our servers are typically dutch: very tall, very thin, muscular and energetic. The extremely tall ceilings worked well for the height of our wait people, but it also made us wonder how far below sea level we are.
We opt, again, for a fixed multi-course dinner. We could have selected a five or a six course meal, but opt instead for only four courses. Thank goodness we did. There was so much food and so much good food, that was more than enough. The servings were thankfully small but the cumulative effect was filling. We opted, of course, also to have the wine pairings. We don’t know if the head waiter was trying to show off or just be cruel, but with each bottle of wine brought we got a long story of the wine, varietal, place of origin, vintner, vintner’s parents… Alright already, pour the wine!
For dessert we opted for two dishes of actual dessert and two cheese plates. There were six generous helpings of a variety of Dutch (and Belgian) cheeses, and man are they good. We knew we love French cheese, but now we have some new cheeses to love.
The hike back to our hotel helped to burn off a couple of the many calories from dinner. We’ll see how many more we can burn in our sleep and then start all over again tomorrow.
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