Frank Jansen Photography

Friday we left at a reasonable hour and took the train to the Hague (Den Haag or ’s Gravenhage in dutch). The Hague is the seat of the Dutch Government, whereas Amsterdam is the Dutch capital.

Upon arrival in the Hague we first went to Madurodam, which advertises itself as “the smallest city in the Netherlands”. Madurodam houses scale models of a large variety of interesting places throughout the Netherlands. This also includes miniature traffic moving in certain areas, shipping activities, trains riding all around Madurodam and even a scale model of Schiphol, the Amsterdam airport. It is continually update with new and interesting architecture or innovations, such as the High Speed Line (HSL) train segment that has been constructed to run all the way to Amsterdam with speeds up to 300 kph (appr. 187 mph).

The models are excellent, as can be seen from this image of one of the Amsterdam canal scenes:

If you look very closely, you can see a non-scale human taking a picture in the background. Another great model that you can compare to its original is the Rotterdam Library, which was in episode 3:

Some of the scale models are truly massive, as the buildings they model are very tall, such as the Nationale Nederlanden building, the original version of which stands in Rotterdam:

A point of interest to a lot of children in the Netherlands is de Efteling, which has grown into a large amusement park. One of the original attractions of de Efteling is the Fairy Tale forest, where little forest dwellers come upon locations that have characters from some of their favorite fairy tales. Seen in this image is the long-necked servant of a prince who is trying to get the princess by answering all the questions put to him by the evil queen:

Dutch architectural highlights are a significant component of Madurodam, including this example of the works of Willem Marinus Dudok; Dudok built the Hilversum City Hall in 1931:

Dudok came out of the Amsterdam School from that time period, and also was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. His style had many followers and he was active until the 1960s.

After leaving Madurodam, it is always fun to get some life-size images of pieces seen in miniature, On the way to Scheveningen, we stopped at the Circus Theater to do just that:

We had lunch of pancakes (bacon pancakes are great!) on the Scheveningen Pier above the North Sea and then went to the government area of the Hague. We stopped by the Gevangenenpoort (Prisoners’ Gate), which dates back to 1375 and housed some key prisoners in its day:

The museum has a great selection of medieval torture devices and give a good idea of conditions during the ‘good old days’.

We walked over to the House of Parliament and de Ridderzaal (Knights’ Hall), which sits on de Binnenhof (Inner Square):

De Ridderzaal dates back to 1290 and is the original meeting place and administrative center of the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. It later became the location for the Staten Generaal (the General Assembly of the States of the Netherlands) and continues to be used for key government functions, such as the presentation of the policy for the next governmental year by the Queen on the third tuesday in September.

There is a lot more to do in the Hague, but our time ran out.