Leiden is a lively university town with its share of canals, old houses and cute boutiques, but I’m not sure anything (except perhaps excessive amounts of caffeine) accounts for why I’ve fallen so completely and unreservedly in love with it.
American history not being my forte, I can’t say I’ve ever been that interested in the pilgrims, but if you ever wondered where our founding fathers came from, below is the church around which they settled temporarily after fleeing persecution in England.
The pilgrim preacher John Robinson lived on this secluded courtyard, which is now a ‘hofie,’ one of the Netherlands’ beautiful historic buildings that now serve as subsidized housing:
Because I think that the only way to really know a place is to get lost in its back streets, here’s one of Leiden’s:
Next is the oldest academic botanical garden of its kind in Europe, founded in the late 1400s or early 1500s (yes, Leiden University is that old). Initially it was a place for the medical students to learn herbs. A professor of botany in the 17th century planted the first tulips here after an ambassador friend of his brought bulbs back from Turkey:
And here’s a windmill that looks very much like the one Rembrandt’s father owned in the 1600s. This is one of the oldest models of windmill, from before the time people figured out you could build a rotating cap on the windmill instead of building the entire windmill on an enormous turntable:
Here’s a bridge across a canal:
And here’s the bottom of another reconstructed windmill. More on windmills soon.
