Bakabee abroad – a visit to the market in Leiden, Netherlands

My favourite things to do when I travel

This Chinese New Year holidays, my husband and I travelled to the Netherlands.  We spent most of the time in Amsterdam which is a fantastic city but one day we travelled to meet friends in Leiden and this is also a very pretty university town. What are your favourite things to do when you travel?  Shop in the high street? Taste the famous local food? Walk around the city or visit the museums?  When Bakabee goes travelling, the most pleasurable thing to do is shopping in markets and, of course, the kitchen gadget shops.  For this post, I’ll stick to what I saw and ate but I did get some great gadgets, which I’ll share in the next post.

Lieden Netherlands

Leiden is just a 30 minute train ride from Amsterdam and our friends live virtually on top of the amazing market. It was fascinating to walk around, full of noise and great aromas.  Open on Wednesdays and Saturdays only, all the stalls are set along the edge of the canal.  These waterways are everywhere in the Netherlands and they make everything look so pretty. When we arrived, it was almost midday and despite some not very nice weather, it was packed with tourists and locals.  I enjoyed walking in the crowd and watching people buying and selling their products.

In the market

In the market, the stalls are in different groups.  Some sell flowers, fresh fish, pastries and chocolates, veggies and herbs, and cheese.  I particularly liked the flower stalls.  They smell incredibly fragrant because all the flowers are so fresh.  They look like the temporary flower markets that spring up in Hong Kong before Chinese New Year.  It made me feel like being at home! The other kind of stalls I enjoyed visiting were the cheese stalls.  Why? First of all, the sellers are really generous and are all super friendly. They let you try as much cheese as you want before you actually made the decision to buy (or not!). I tried Gouda cheese with spinach, pine nuts and basil, goat cheese with cumin and goats cheese with mustard seeds.  To be honest, I liked them all!!! If you are a cheese lover, you can keep eating cheese all day without paying a penny.  Actually, it’s not enough for me to use the word ‘delicious’ to describe the taste.  They all tasted beyond delicious and so different from the cheeses you can normally buy in supermarkets. Alongside the market stalls, there are a lot of boutiques, cafés, bars and bakeries lining the little cobbled streets.  They are full of character, all attractively well-decorated to draw in customers.   First of all, we visited a local bakery to choose some bread. I apologize that you cannot smell by looking at the photo.  In the shop, the smell was so incredibly nice and the way they showcase the bread is very appeztiting.  So many breads and all the loaves are vertically displayed on and behind the counter.  When a customer wants a particular loaf of bread, the staff are happy to put the loaf into the bread slicing machine which takes a whole loaf of bread and makes it neatly cut and packed.  This is what freshness means.

Visit a cake shop

After the bread shop, Bakabee went to a cake shop to choose some cakes for dessert.  Wow!  It was almost impossible to get in because it was just packed with customers, we even needed to take a ticket for our turn like a bank waiting room.  Everyone was taking their time choosing what they wanted (and there were more free samples).  Each cake was so very pretty and tempting, it was difficult to make a decision.  I ended up choosing smaller cakes instead of a big one because we could try more flavours. This is always a better solution.  Finally, I chose berry tarts, an apple tart and a red velvet mini cake.  I liked the red velvet mini cake the most because it was the prettiest.  It was a 3-layer mini cake with cream cheese frosting, wrapped by a red thin layer of red marzipan and decorated with a candy in the middle.  It’s elegant, isn’t it? And… it tasted very delicious.

Why not share one of your foodie travelling stories, or I would love to read your comments below. Maybe you have been to the same market? Looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you for reading my post again!  See you next time.