The International Den Haag Nobody Talks About
People ask me why I stayed. I arrived for an ICC posting, planning eighteen months. Four years later I am still here, still surprised by what this city is, and still annoyed that nobody seems to know about it.
Den Haag is the international city of the Netherlands. Not Amsterdam, which is an international city in the tourist sense. Den Haag is international in a different, more permanent way. The International Criminal Court. Europol. The OPCW. Eurojust. The International Court of Justice. Dozens of embassies. Several hundred NGOs. And because of all of this, somewhere between 180 and 200 nationalities living and working in a city of 550,000 people.
What this actually looks like
It means the food is extraordinary. Not because of restaurants catering to tourists but because people from 180 countries need to eat the food they grew up with. The Nigerian grocery on the Wagenstraat. The proper West African restaurant that does not appear on any tourist list. The Ethiopian restaurant that the Eritrean community also uses. The Filipino community centre that sometimes sells food on weekends. The Indonesian food that is genuinely the best in the Netherlands, cooked by families who have been here for three generations.
It means the city operates in English as a genuine second language, not as a tourist service. At my workplace the working language is English. At my local gym it is effectively English. At the international school where my colleagues send their children, it is English. This makes Den Haag significantly easier to navigate than Amsterdam for people who do not speak Dutch, paradoxically.
The international community itself
There is, of course, a bubble. The expat bubble in Den Haag is real and it is comfortable and it is completely possible to live inside it for years without engaging with the Dutch city around you. I have colleagues who have been here five years and know only the Archipelbuurt, the ICC canteen, and the international school. This is a waste of a genuinely interesting city.
The international community congregates around Benoordenhout and the Archipelbuurt — beautiful old streets, large houses, embassies. Good quality of life. Also somewhat insulated from the rest of the city. The people I have found most interesting are the ones who ended up in Bezuidenhout or even further afield, who cycle to work through neighbourhoods that the international relocation guides do not mention.
Where to connect if you are new
The Expat Centre Den Haag exists and is useful for bureaucracy. Beyond that: the international sports clubs (rugby, cricket, American football) are genuinely welcoming and mixed. The international networking events at the World Forum are often better quality than they sound. The walking tours organised by volunteers covering the city’s international history are excellent and usually free or donation-based.
But the best way I found to actually integrate was to cycle somewhere new every weekend and talk to whoever was at the cafe I stopped at. Den Haag people are direct but not unfriendly. They do not volunteer conversation but they respond well to genuine curiosity about their city.
What the international community gives the city
Diversity, yes. But more specifically: a reason for restaurants, shops, and services that would not exist in a purely Dutch city of this size. The quality of the food scene here — properly international, not tourist-international — is directly because 180 nationalities demand their own cuisine. The cultural programming is richer than the city’s size would normally justify because the international institutions bring their own events. The city is genuinely more cosmopolitan in the daily-life sense than Amsterdam, which can sometimes feel like a theme park of cosmopolitanism without the real thing underneath.
