NoHo Fo’ Sho: Den Haag

Sorry (or you’re welcome) that it’s been so long since my last Eurotrip photo dump. By now these photos are like two months old, but I don’t imagine that matters to anyone but me. This will be the last batch from the Netherlands, and I’m going to be more selective about what I post from subsequent destinations.

Emily is a government geek. We visited many of the state capitols during our domestic travels, and we’ve been to the capitol cities (if not the capitol buildings themselves) in every European country we’ve visited except for Belgium, where we spent only a few days. So, she was eager to visit The Hague.

It turned out to be a lot neater than I expected. When you first get off of the train, it looks like nothing but high rises and office buildings, but you soon find that it has a bit more charm than that.

MC Escher Museum

This was a lot more than just a collection of the artist’s works, the most famous of which I was already familiar with from posters in the dorm rooms of college friends. In addition to the pieces themselves, the museum does an excellent job of telling Escher’s story: how he began experimenting with perspective, the mathematical foundations of his work, and the process by which the most famous pieces were created. On the top floor there were even a number of interactive exhibits where we could play around with perspective and optical illusions ourselves.

Binnenhof

The Binnenhof is the seat of government in the Netherlands. As with Muiderslot, we could enter only as part of a tour narrated in Dutch, so that’s what we did. It turned out that the rest of the tour was comprised of a busload of seniors. To their credit, they kept up with a brisker pace than I would have expected and navigated some narrow, winding staircases with impressive agility.

We saw first the Hall of Knights, which is the oldest building in the city and the place where the Queen still gives her most important speech each year. We had plenty of time to take pictures of its impressive interior, because our guide spent a good twenty minutes talking about it in Dutch to the rest of the group. She must have been entertaining, because she got a lot of laughs.

Then it was on to the chamber where the legislature meets. We were able to sit in on a few minutes of a session, which despite being in Dutch was no more boring than sitting in on a session of the US Congress. Unfortunately no pictures were allowed inside. We did, however, have a few minutes to take pictures of the courtyard and the exterior, which feature an interesting blend of architectures from the 13th century all the way up to the 20th.