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No Lying About in Leiden

If you're in the market for a high number of museums per square mile in your next Dutch holiday destination, try Leiden, sandwiched between its bigger and more famous brothers Amsterdam and The Hague. Leiden is an old university city, so all those academic minds were concentrated on creating history and culture and sharing it with everyone who drops by.

The Museum Boerhaave is a medical museum housed in an old hospital, and you can find a few gory things like a skeleton collection, preserved limbs, artificial hips and a seventeenth century bleeding bowl. Or try the National Museum of Antiquities, with its 6000 objects from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome and from the earliest evidence of life in the Netherlands.

To get really Dutch, there's always the De Valk Municipal Windmill Museum where you can learn what life in a working windmill used to be like. And if you're really a glutton for information and education, the Regional Archives Museum is the one for you: six kilometers of documents are stored there, some over 700 years old. The archives are mostly in Dutch, of course, but after a couple of days in Leiden museums you should be fluent anyway.

[Photo: ironmanixs]

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