Europe 2012-Day 14: Miniture Holland, The Beach, and Delft

Once again we dropped Nate off at work, but today we headed west out towards 's-Gravenhage (The Haag.) The Haag is not the capital of Holland but it is where the royal family lives and where the parliament buildings are located.

Van der Heijden is the last name of my Dutch ancestors

The Haag

We were going to visit the Madurodam. The Madurodam is a miniature model of most of the major landmarks and important things you’ll find in Holland from the airport to the palaces. 

The Madurodam was originally opened in 1952. It was named after a Jewish law student named George Maduro who fought the Nazi occupation as a member of the Dutch resistance during WWII. George died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. George was posthumously given the highest and oldest military decoration in the Kingdom of the Netherlands; Knight 4^th-class of the Military Order of William. His parents donated the money for the Madurodam project.

When Nazi's captured this building, George and 5 other guys ran around the building shooting (with only one machine gun) making the Nazi's think they were surrounded and they actually surrendered to them.

Memorial to George

When you go inside and around the corner, the first thing that surprised me was how huge the place really was. It took over an hour for us to go through it. To try make sure we didn’t miss anything we started by going from side to side working towards the back. 

A view across the park

A bird bigger than cows!

Here is the model of Palace Het Loo that we visited the first weekend

This is St. Johns Cathedral located in Den Bosch

The Dom in Utrecht

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam

Castle Muiden

Something funny about full size gardeners at the palace

The Peace Palace in Den Haag which houses the International court of Justice

The square in Amsterdam

The Parliament building in The Haag

The Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam

Where all the flowers are sold. Holland exports 2/3 of the worlds supply of flowers/cut flowers/bulbs.

What a traditional flower farm is like

A hunting lodge

Soccer is a huge sport in Holland

Efteling theme park in the Netherlands

When we were about ¾ of the way through we started getting hungry for lunch, so we rushed through the rest of it and then grabbed a hot dog from a vender inside.

Before leaving we looked in the gift shop and I was able to find a sweatshirt that I liked in my size, so I bought it.

While putting my camera away I accidently turned my cell phone off, and as I couldn’t remember my pin number for my SIM card we had no way of contacting Nate to see when he would be getting off work. We still had several hours though so I decided to see how far away the beach was, since I knew the Haag was close to the Ocean. As it turned out it was only 2.2 Kilometers away, so we went to find it.

Beach wheelchair

The beach at the Haag

The sand was very soft and powdery

So many shells.

We found a place to park near the beach, and then walked out to it. We were only allowed to put 15 min on the meter, so we didn’t have much more time then to just walk to the ocean and back to the car. The beach was really deep and it was covered in tons of tiny shells. It was really quite pretty.

When we left the beach Kristie was wishing for some coffee, so I suggested we stop in Delft which would be along the way. I thought she might like to see some of the Delftware shops as well, since some of the hand painted items are amazing.

After getting off the freeway we had some difficulties finding parking. The first garage was backed up but after searching we eventually went back to the same garage and went down to park.

Walking into the centrum we found an open market going on, so there were tents everywhere. I was a little disappointed simply because you can’t really see the beauty of some of the buildings because of all the tents. 

Pants made out of pants and more pants!

Delftware

The open market in the city center

The little tea sets are tiny

Kristie and I got a couple of cute hand painted Delft dishes, and after walking around a bit we figured we had to leave to get back in time for Nate to get off work. As we got back to the freeway though we found traffic to be pretty bad, which slowed us down a bit. By the time we were getting close to home we decided to just go straight to ASML. We got there around 6 PM, and I didn’t know if Nate had been trying to contact me for the last hour, or if he was too busy and didn’t want me there yet.

I went to the reception desk and talked to a very nice lady named Henny. She called Nate’s cell phone for me and got his Dutch voicemail. She then tried contacting him by email. He responded on that, and said he would come down. While I waited for him Henny and I chatted about Holland.

Because we were getting home late and didn’t feel like cooking we decided to try a new restaurant in Eindhoven called The Ribs Factory. This restaurant had been recommended to us by many people. Nate and Dave went with the ribs, but I thought I would try a burger. My burger was one of the best I’ve ever had. It was cooked perfectly with cheddar cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, BBQ sauce and a garlic sauce. Overall we still prefer the ribs at De Bengels, but if we want a burger we’ll be going to The Rib Factory.