When I still lived in Rotterdam, I really couldn’t say that nearby Dordrecht was an attraction and offered many reasons to visit. That changed when I found out just a couple of years ago that the Christmas market in Dordrecht, which only occurred one weekend every year, is often written up as the best in the country.  Funny that living in Amsterdam, we now had to make the over-hourlong trek to see it.

We were extremely lucky as it was a gorgeous and sunny Dutch winter day with the bluest cloudless sky, going in and coming out of the city was seamless, parking was incredibly cheap and close by, and I could finally say that after all these years, I’d been to Dordrecht. While most of the surrounding area was typical of any Dutch city, the old town was quite interesting and made for a nice, leisurely walk around. As for the Christmas market, it proved to be more on the practical side than festive, and paled in comparison with those in neighboring Germany. Sorry, Netherlands, but cell phone chargers shouldn’t count as Christmas market fodder – my partner going on to say that of all the items we saw on sale, only about a fifth were holiday-related. I loved my time in Dordrecht, though, with the memory of Christmas songs in the church square a nice preparation as we count down the days to our upcoming, hopefully fairytale-like, holiday.