Alkmaar is a handsome old town about half an hour north of Amsterdam by train, best known for its cheese market. The market runs on Friday mornings from spring to autumn and is a genuine spectacle: porters in white uniforms carry wheels of Gouda on ornamental wooden barrows, buyers and sellers seal deals with ritual hand-clapping, and the whole thing is over by noon. It is touristy, but it is also real — this is how cheese was traded here for over four centuries.
The town itself rewards a longer stop. A ring of canal and moat encloses a tight old centre of stepped gables, brick lanes, and unobtrusive 17th-century hofjes. The late-Gothic Grote Kerk holds one of the world's finest historic organs; the Stedelijk Museum tells the story of the 1573 siege that gave the Netherlands its founding national motto — "Van Alkmaar de Victorie begint". Smaller attractions cluster on around the Waagplein — the cheese museum in the Waag building, the National Beer Museum, an idiosyncratic Beatles Museum in a canal house.
Alkmaar is small enough to see in a day. Friday is the day to come — the market is the main event — but the town is well worth a quieter visit on another day in the week, when the cobbles and canals are not full of bus groups. Some guidebooks pair it with a trip to the Zaanse Schans; if you came to the Netherlands for windmills, that is the obvious combination, though Alkmaar on its own is no less worthwhile.