To attend Alkmaar's 600 year-old cheese market was high on my list of travel goals for the Netherlands. I booked a hostel bed for the night before to get an early start but ended up booking a second night because I wasn’t able to find hostel accommodation a little to the south closer to Keukenhof Gardens for the second night. I figured I’d use Alkmaar as a base to explore a little more of Noord Holland but ended up spending the whole day in town.

Alkmaar is a town that’s over a thousand years old and was one of the most significant towns in Noord Holland besides Amsterdam and Haarlem . The area around Alkmaar consists mostly of drained land below sea level, soil that stays quite wet so is much better suited to pasture land for cattle than cropland. Hence, the region became a major center of dairy farming and cheese production. Like Americans from Wisconsin, Dutch people from Noord Holland are called "Cheese Heads".

I stayed for most of the cheese market and then wandered Alkmaar and its limited sites for a few hours afterwards. Saint Lurenskerk, also known as the Grote Kerk featured prominently in many paintings of the Dutch Golden Age, the massive church serving a town of only around 8,000 people in the 1600s. Nowadays, like many churches in the Netherlands, it’s deconsecrated and used as both a museum and concert hall. There was a great organ concert taking place while I was there. Nowadays Alkmaar has over 100,000 people and is quite a modern place outside the canals that ringed the city and supported its defense in medieval and renaissance times. Being within commuting distance of Amsterdam, Alkmaar has much more of an urban feel that I’d expect from a Dutch provincial town. Somehow I have it in my mind that this was where we stayed for two nights in Holland on my 1985 European coach tour with my family. I can’t say I recognize anything, though.

Once the huge crowds that show up for the Friday cheese market empty out by mid-afternoon, Alkmaar’s center is a fairly quiet place. For me the other big attraction was the Stadelijk Museum, sort of a national regional museum focusing on the history and art of Alkmaar. Its two main focuses are Alkmaar’s Golden Age in the 1600s and the “Bergen School”, a Dutch movement of painters based in the nearby town of Bergen that experimented with Expressionism in the 1915-1930 era, a regional “school” of art similar to “The Hague School” of realism in the late 1800s.