Yesterday I went to Amsterdam and visited the Royal Palace of the House of Orange. This isn't actually a picture of Queen Beatrix's house, though. It's a beautiful building right across the street. The palace itself has been undergoing extensive renovation, and the exterior is still covered with tarps and scaffolding. Today the queen and her family reside in the city of Den Haag, but they still use the Amsterdam palace frequently for special dinners, receptions, and ceremonies.
The palace sits on the Dam Square, kitty corner to the Nieuwe Kerk, or the "New Church." The monarchs of Holland are crowned in this building.
The Royal Palace has not always been a palace. When first built in the seventeenth century it served as a magnificent new town hall. In this marble room, on the ground level of the palace, the town magistrates sentenced criminals to death. The public could watch the proceedings from behind the iron bars of windows, like the one on the right.
And just to make sure you didn't forget why you were there, these crying babies and grinning skull reminded you! It's a little creepy to think of all the people who came into this room to hear their final verdict.
In the early nineteenth century, Napoleon took conquered the Netherlands and made his brother, Louis Bonaparte, kind of Holland. The new French king confiscated Amsterdam's town hall, radically adjusted the furnishings, and transformed it into a palace for himself. This room once held his throne.
After Napoleon's fall, the Dutch House of Orange regained power. They decided to move into Louis Bonaparte's palace and not return it to a town hall.
Queen Beatrix--the current monarch--grew up in the Royal Palace, and it's amazing to see the rooms that she and her family lived in with crystal chandeliers hanging from the painted ceilings, portraits of their ancestors in golden frames on the walls, and chairs with gilded lion heads.
When presidents or monarchs from other countries visit the Netherlands, they stay in the Royal Palace, especially now that it has been refurbished with modern conveniences. So I guess this is the sort of room that President Obama gets when he comes to Holland ...
After leaving the palace, I walked over to visit the Ann Frank house. There was an enormous line to get in, and so I'll have to come back another day. She and her family hid during the Nazi occupation of Holland in a building right by the beautiful Westerkerk, or "Western Church." A statue on the church grounds memorializes Ann, who died in the concentration camps.
The Protestant Westerkerk is mostly built from bricks, but the tower is decorated with the crown of the royal family in blue, gold, and red.
Today was Stake Conference (a biannual meeting of all the members for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints within a geographical area called a "stake"). The stake for this part of Holland is based in Den Haag, and today was a very special occasion since it was the fiftieth anniversary of the organization of the Den Haag stake--the oldest stake in continental Europe. The meeting last night was wonderful, and this morning we rode our bikes to the building where the Sunday session of the conference was going to be held. I had been told it would be about a forty-five minute ride. Well, there was a fairly strong wind blowing, part of the road was unexpectedly closed, and there was an American who still didn't have much endurance for long Dutch bike rides! So it ended up taking us an hour and a half! I really should be able to go faster--after all there cannot be a more flat country than the Netherlands. But that wind is treacherous! Because it took us so much longer than expected, we had to really speed up towards the end, and I thought I was going to die. There were times when I started to have visions of myself, keeling off the road and crashing to my death in the daffodil patches!
After another wonderful meeting this afternoon, we biked home. The wind was in our favor this time, and that made an incredible difference. Our road took us through beautiful Dutch villages, alongside green fields with sheep grazing in them, and past rows and rows of green tulip leaves and daffodils, just starting to open. There are so many different kinds of birds in the Netherlands--geese, swans, meadow birds, and many others that migrate thousands of miles every year to African and the Mediterranean. We saw some near the canal that ran by part of our bike path. I'm going to ride back along these roads when the tulip season comes and take some more pictures of the landscape. On our way back, we stopped at three Catholic churches, all built in the same somber brick with towers that soar above the houses, trees, and shops. Only one of them was open, but we got to walk around the churchyards of two of the others. It's always interesting to me to see the different types of tombstones other cultures design and the way they care for their graves. Many of these headstones had hyacinths and daffodils growing around them. It always makes me sad to see the toys and pinwheels on the children's graves. This is a picture of some crocus in a wooded area behind one of these churches.
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