A bus full of tulip watchers

The Hague in snowy spring

I met Giulia the summer before my senior year of college, when I first came to New York as an intern. We were both renting out rooms in communal Airbnbs managed by the same owner, and Giulia’s had been overbooked somehow, so she was sent to sleep on our couch. If I had been in Giulia’s shoes - fresh off a transatlantic flight from Milan, forced to couch-surf with a bunch of random people - I think I would have had a panic attack. Instead, Giulia was so lovely and funny and warm. She was so Italian. We hit if off immediately and, after she’d settled into her proper room one apartment down, spent the rest of the summer moving in and out of each other’s orbit. Years later, we are still friends, although most of our contact has been digital. Giulia moved back to Europe after that summer. A few years ago we met up for a long weekend in Lisbon. Giulia impressed me by revealing that she speaks fluent Portuguese and taking me to a string of hidden restaurants where we drank vinho verde late into the night. Then the pandemic happened, and it was hard to say when we’d see each other next. A few weeks ago I flew to visit her in The Hague, where she now lives and works. It was late March, the start of tulip season.

I’d been to The Hague once, many years ago, on a short day trip. It was autumn then, and I’d walked through the city center, seen Parliament and the Vermeers hanging in the Mauritshuis, dipped my toes in the North Sea, then gotten on a train and headed back to Amsterdam. This time Giulia picked me up in the airport - the luxury of being picked up in an airport by a girlfriend after years of pandemic separation! - and we exited the train to find that it was snowing. 

New bucket list item: get an Italian to prepare you a snack board.

Giulia’s flat was down a street of perfect Dutch row houses, all exactly the same from the outside. We walked up three flights of impossibly narrow stairs and then I was in Giulia’s apartment, softly lit, a huge cheese board already set out complete with cannoli and Italian flatbreads. Giulia loves books, just like me, and has shelves upon shelves of them, a huge library filled with a mix of Italian and English. We split a bottle of white wine and talked until way too late into the night. I fell asleep to snow still falling outside the window, blanketing the many perfect rows of bikes.

That weekend in The Hague is so colored by my experience of seeing Giulia again, and her marvelous apartment, that it’s hard to parse out what is special about the city from what is special about my friend. Giulia with her Moka Bialetti, perfectly aged, bubbling away on the stovetop for our morning breakfast spreads. Her giant jars of homemade limoncello aging in a cupboard under the kitchen counter, sunshine captured in glass. Us walking through the city center, taking breaks every half-hour or so to stop and order an espresso. 

One batch of Giulia’s limoncello.

I was reminded of the treats economy of the Dutch, how every coffee comes with a tiny bite-sized cookie, how every café has huge slices of the nicest cakes you’ve ever seen on offer. When I asked one barista for their opinion on which cake to order, he gestured at each in turn and said “good,” “good,” “good.” He was joking with me but I was also sure he was right. The Dutch don’t fuck around with their baked goods. I couldn’t resist ordering a boterkoek at one café - a Dutch butter cookie, new to me - which was so buttery and rich that it tasted like a slab of cookie dough on a platter. One day I bought a a huge, fresh stroopwafel as we walked by Parliament, wrapped in a paper cone, the caramel dripping down into viscous puddle at the bottom.

We took a train to Keukenhof on my last full day to see the tulips. The countryside as seen from the train was hypnotic: flat, grassy fields interspersed every few meters with shallow canals running like ribbons, the occasional tulip field exploding into color, tiny droplets of rain splattering against the glass. The gardens were full of slightly droopy flowers from the recent snowfall, some quite obviously squashed before their prime. Other sections were perfect, untouched somehow. Everyone was a tourist and the crowd trickled along at a snail’s pace because everyone needed their perfect Instagram shot.

We walked by an American woman who I overheard saying “I hate flowers” to her partner. We walked by a group of tiny girls chanting “I’m a pretty flower” as they ran in a circle, crushing tulips in their chubby excited hands. We walked into a greenhouse and saw every variety of tulips in existence, more tulips than could be imagined, all perfectly protected from the elements. Some where absolutely hideous. Some where so beautiful that I wanted to stick my face in them. Afterwards, we had to wait for a bus to get back to the train, and when it finally arrived twenty minutes later we were crushed inside along with every other tourist in the world. An extremely forward Dutch man tried to hit on Giulia and I, inviting us to get a drink with him at the train station bar. We laughed and said no and went home and had a beautiful dinner together. 

I flew back to Dublin and was picked up at the airport again, this time by Peter and Rigby. I felt so lucky for everything.