After a morning of stressful and disappointing drive in search of tulips we ended up in Leiden. We weren’t planning on spending too much time there, since we assumed that Leiden would be similar to Haarlem, which we saw the day before, and Ghent, where we were heading. A friend of mine advised me earlier that all little town in Europe are cute but quite a like. However, Leiden turned out to be quite different from Haarlem, and in retrospect quite unlike most other places we saw. While quite small, it had a feeling of a real town, where real people lived and things were happening. It also had very diverse architecture, varying from medieval to modern. We ended up spending a total of about two hours in Leiden (hour and a half in the downtown and another half hour exploring the windmill). We wished we had more time, but we needed to be in Ghent before too late and still wanted to stop in Delft or Rotterdam.