Den Haag, the beach, and baby windmills



I made the conscious decision to be more extroverted, outgoing, and adventurous when coming to Europe. Honestly, I'm more inclined to sleep on Saturday than get up at 5am and get on a bus, but that's exactly what I've been doing almost once a month since coming here. Because of my age, I'm typically too old for many student tours, even though that is exactly what I am, but there are two organizations at school where they overlook the age: ISOW and IxESN. ISOW is the Internation Student Organization and ESN is the Erasmus Student Network. I'm not Erasmus, but they allow any international student at my school to join. Bonus for me!

I've had the opportunity to travel through both organizations quite a bit, and I'll talk about ESN in the next post, but for now, let's go to Den Haag!

The day trip (always on a Saturday from roughly 6am-11pm) took us by bus to the UNESCO World Heritage Site Kinderdijk where we walked around and took photos of a dozen still operating Windmills, then we went on to Den Haag where we had a half hour for lunch and then a walking tour of the city, followed by an hour for ourselves before getting back on the bus and going to the beach for an hour, and then on the the minitures park Madurodam.

First off, this is organized and led by students, so be prepared for google maps directions and people pleasing. At one point I actually told the tour guides to just tell people "no" when they complained about the timing. They did agree that they went to too many places and that future trips would not go by bus to the beach (you can get there on the metro from Den Haag).

Kinderdijk was cool, but an hour is all you need to devote to wandering and taking photos. The windmill museum costs 8E which was more than I wanted to pay to go inside a windmill when I've got one in my town I can go to for free.


Den Haag has a lot to offer to the wanderer and even more if you brave the busses. We walked and I still managed to find China Town (one block haha), a Muslim Masque and School, and the Peace Palace all on my own. We did a walking tour which was alright, but google maps is free and you don't need to pay anyone to point out the Palace, various museums, or churches.

Peace Palace

The beach was fun, but only because there was a kite festival happening when we were there (I'm less impressed with beaches coming from Florida). My all-time favorite place though was the minatures park Madurodam! Absolutely worth the 14.50E entrance fee. Bring sneakers though because three hours will not be enough time to really explore this amazing themepark.





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