Utrecht is just as great as Amsterdam

When we started dreaming about doing a home exchange in the Netherlands, I targeted Utrecht as our ideal home base.  The city is a short (30 minute) train ride from Amsterdam, centrally located within the Netherlands, and has it’s own beautiful canals, museums, restaurants and nightlife.  Amersfoort, the city we ended up living in while we were in the Netherlands, is a 14 minute train ride northeast of Utrecht.  We ended up visiting Utrecht four times during our stay – once with the kids to visit the Miffy Museum and three times just Brian and I.  I love the city.  It’s not as intimidating as Amsterdam with regard to the size, you can see everything you need to within walking distance from the train station (not the case in Amsterdam – the museums are far!), and it’s less crowded with tourists – especially at night.

 

 

 

The Canals

Everyone knows Amsterdam has beautiful canals.  What most people don’t know, is that Utrecht has a beautiful 2-story canal, the Oudegracht.  A long time ago, the lower level of the canals were used as wharves for loading and unloading goods into lower level warehouses for the businesses above.  Today, many of these warehouses have been converted to cozy restaurants and bars.  You can sit right alongside the canal and have dinner or a drink – just don’t fall in!  We loved sitting by the water and watching the boats go by.  Except be forewarned, the canal is still used to make some deliveries and pick up garbage.  We found that out when the garbage barge went by…the next 10 minutes until the air cleared were not pleasant.

 

 

 

 

The Restaurants

The restaurant scene in Utrecht is great.  The city is big enough to have a variety of different types of restaurants in every price range as well as great ethnic cuisine.  Both of the restaurants below we selected based on their reviews on Google and they were awesome.  Neither of them were cheap (27-34 euros per person), but the food was so amazing I didn’t care what it cost.  And they had cheap wine, so all was good.  These restaurants are also located within walking distance of the train station.

• Restaurant Blauw Utrecht
  • This Indonesian restaurant with a 4.5/5 rating on Google is about a 9 minute walk south of the train station.  Eating Indonesian food was one of the things I wanted to do in the Netherlands.  Why?  Because Indonesia used to be a Dutch colony so Indonesian food (with a Dutch twist) is very popular here.  We went to this restaurant specifically to order Rijsttafel.  There are several other dishes on the menu, but if you’ve never had Indonesian food before, the Rijsttafel is the way to go.  Rijsttafel translates to “rice table” and is many small dishes of Indonesian foods served with rice.  You get to sample a lot of different kinds of food, and it just looks super cool on the table :).  We ate everything…yum!  I did learn that Rijsttafel is a uniquely Dutch way to serve Indonesian food, so if you go to an Indonesian restaurant in the U.S., it’s not likely to be on the menu.  The history behind serving this sampler menu reaches back to when Indonesia was a Dutch colony and the Dutch wanted to serve a variety of menu items to visitors at a single dinner.

 

• Darah Afghan Restaurant
  • This Afghan restaurant with a 4.8/5 rating on Google is about an 8 minute walk east of the train station along the canal – although you can’t actually eat along the canal as all the seating is indoors.  Pretty much every review said to order the “surprise menu” which consisted of 3 courses of food including desert.  Since we had no idea what anything on the menu was and we wanted to try a lot of different things, we took the advice of previous diners and got the “surprise menu”.  The problem with doing this is that I still have no idea what we actually ate so I wouldn’t know what to order if we went back again.  There was some spice to the majority of the food, but the only thing I didn’t like was the cooked spinach.  But seriously, who actually likes cooked spinach?  Yuck.

 

 

 

Another area we liked based on it’s atmosphere were the restaurants lining Drieharingstraat (that’s the name of a street), such as De Markt.  We didn’t eat there, only had drinks, but it was a great, narrow, cozy street and all of the restaurants looked packed.  I’d recommend going here for dinner or drinks though – this narrow street is really packed during the day and no one wants to eat with other people constantly bumping in to their table.

 

Stuff to Do

When we visited Utrecht, or main agenda each day was to walk around, find somewhere to have a drink, walk around some more, find somewhere to have dinner.  We didn’t try to follow some kind of “Utrecht in a Day” itinerary or really even Google what we were supposed to do in this city.  However, there are a ton of attractions in Utrecht if that’s what you want to do – this is definitely not a sleepy city.  Here are some of the activities we did:

• Explore the canal area – The main canal in the central city, the Oudegracht, runs north/south through the middle of the city.  The first thing you should do upon arrival is walk up and down both sides of this canal and talk about how awesome it is.  Then stop for a drink at a cellar bar along the canal and continue your discussion about how cool it is.

 

 

• Dom Tower – This iconic church tower is a Utrecht landmark.  See this link for a separate post about this tower.

 

• Miffy (Nijntje) Museum – This museum is dedicated to Miffy, the little illustrated character Utrecht native Dick Bruna created.  This museum is for little kids and I wrote about our visit in a separate post.

 

• National Military Museum – Although not in Utrecht, it’s only a short drive or bus ride away so if you are visiting Utrecht, you could easily visit this museum as well.  See this link for a separate post about this museum.

If you’re in the mood for some unique craft beer and you don’t want to sit along the canal, go to De Drie Dorstige Herten.  This super small bar is not in a touristy area and has an amazing beer list (according to Brian – he’s obviously the beer critic in this family).

Other attractions many people enjoy in Utrecht are visiting the Rietveld Schroder House (we tried to go here, but the tours were full for the day we wanted to visit), Centraal Museum, the flower market, Museum Speelkok and the Railway Museum (we also wanted to visit this museum, but the timing never worked out).

 

Central Station

Utrecht’s Central Station (train station) is pretty cool just by itself.  The station is huge and directly connected to an enormous mall with every store you can think of.  It’s kind of confusing when you exit the train station because the most convenient way to get to the main area of town is by walking through the mall.

Central Station also has an amazing bike parking garage that is the largest in the Netherlands.  It’s under construction right now, but by the end of this year it’s supposed to have capacity for 12,500 bikes which will make it the largest bike parking garage in the world.