Went looking this morning for the famous Intel Hotel Zaandam, which is known for its kooky, colourful architecture. We had a perfect day for it – weather was gorgeous, and is probably going to be the last sunny day we will get for a while. Problem was, the front of this hotel seem rather hard to find. There are plenty of other bright coloured buildings in Zaandam, but not quite the one I was looking for…
Close, but no cigar, I think that is the back of it on the right.
Felt like we were getting closer…
And then disco! Around one more corner and the perfect vantage point for the frontage of the crazy arse Intel Zaandam Hotel… I’d stay here, but it kinda looks unstable; like someone designed it while stoned out of their gourd.
Anyway, after chasing down some crazy architecture and a decent coffee for Mr K, we hit the road towards Keukenhof to chase us some tulip fields. Back in 1993, I went to the Wynyard Tulip Festival in Tasmania, most of the way to Davenport on a day trip from Hobart – and the images I took from that trip were like this one below… long lines of tulips being grown for commercial purposes. Still beautiful, but flowers growing bulk in straight lines on singular colours for harvesting.
My god did I have that wrong – Keukenhof is known as the ‘Garden of Europe’ and I knew that before we got here, but I figured it was one of those self proclamation things that is always exaggerated, yeah?
Turns out that Keukenhof is one of the world’s largest flower gardens and gardeners and flower fanciers literally come from all over the world to see the gorgeous flowers when they are in bloom – which is about now… March to late April before the tulips are all beheaded and the bulbs eventually pulled up.
Most of the rest of this post is going to be just Pretty Flower Porn, so if it’s not your thing – scroll on by, baby.
We walked around into a large communal area in front of one of the cafes, (and I say ‘one of’, because there are several!), to find this weird automated hurti-gurdi organ thing playing, ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’ by the Bangles, but sounding like a Wallace and Gromit intro… and let me tell you, that is a vile ear worm to give to people wandering around a psychedelically bright, hyper stimulated environment filled with colour and packed with people! Yes, I know there are no people in my pictures, but the place was as packed as a Manhattan side walk at a St Patrick’s Day Parade! This noisy thing, can go eat a bag of dicks though!
Anyway, back to the beautiful hues of the flowers. Something, something… preferably with a soundtrack from Alice of Wonderland or something…
I loved these ragged looking yellow tulips… never seen anything like them before. They were so fine and fringey in appearance, they looked more like silk or fabric than living flower petals.
Purple and red – best flower colour combo ever!
It’s about now that we start to get a feeling for how large the park is – it covers an area of 32 hectares and they say that approximately 7 million flower bulbs are planted in the gardens annually. 😮
That’s a LOT of bulbs and bullshit.
So many vibrant colours!
These ones look very cool.. a Van Gogh palette if I’ve ever seen one.
The gardens were opened in 1950 and have approximately 1.5 million visitors a year, which is no small feat considering they are only open this year from March 21st to May 12th, with their usual annual visitors season only last 8 weeks. After that, the gardens are closed as no one wants to come and see bare garden beds. Seems perennials aren’t really their thing here. We didn’t come here specifically at this time of year to see the gardens, it just happened to be on a ‘Things To Do’ in the area, list when I Googled up something to do on our way out of Amsterdam, and we though, ‘Sure, sounds like something different.’. We did however meet a couple on the plane who were beside themselves with excitement because they had always wanted to come to Keukenhof, and they had flown from Australia just to see these gardens. I hope they were here today, as this was the only sunny day we were going to get this week! I’m sure they weren’t disappointed though.
So many gorgeous colours… I took sooo many photos.
Some of these images look surreal, the colour is so punchy and the leaves so vibrant and shiny.
Red and purple… what do we say? We say, ‘yes!’. Always say, ‘yes’, to red and purple flowers.
There were many areas that were planted to look more like wild meadows, with flowers coming up among grasses between the trees – which is something you rarely seen in Australia, unless it is some introduced pest species.
Mr K promised not to do any tip-toeing, and true to his word, here he is squatting amongst the tulips.
Orange is not one of my favourite hues, but these complimented each other beautifully.
There’s been lots of thoughtful planting here. The colour combinations and the layout and design of the garden beds is truly spectacular. Yes, I know that is coming from someone who could kill a mint plant (and should confess, I actually have killed some mint plants), but I can still appreciate the work that goes into a place like this.
I mean, look at that…!
Oddly, I do not like commercial cut flowers, I think they are expensive, unsustainable as an industry and they look lovely, but they just bloody die in your house! But these gorgeous flowers alive and in the dirt, I can really appreciate that – even though I know they’re gonna die soon too, yeah, I know. Weird.
There was some cool stuff in the gift shop by the exit – tulip themed mugs, cheese boards, magnets, key rings, coasters, tea towels, coffee mugs, and fucking tulips smacked on everything, but there was also these cool Bylin Tulip handbags which were made of leather and looked very cool. *Mental note: I need to show them to Humphrey.
https://by-lin.com/product-category/tulip-collection/tulip-handbags/
Anyway, we eventually had to get going and head to The Hague and more beautiful tulip fields lined our drive towards the town.
We were headed to The Hague to visit the Peace Palace. The Peace Palace (Vredespaleis) is an international law building. It houses the International Court of Justice, which is the main judicial body of the United Natinls, and has Arbitration Courts, an Academy of International Law and an enormous law library. Built in 1913, it has been a place of arbitration and international collaboration ever since.
Unfortunately, there were no guided tours available today else we would have been able to go in and see cool stuff like this:
Thanks Wikipedia for showing us what we can’t see today! 😛 And I was sooo looking forward to seeing that vase that is taller than me that was gifted by Russia – bet Putin would like it back now, it’d probably cover his poisons budget for a few months. Instead, we had to content ourselves with a poke through the visitors centre. The entire city of Haag is dedicated to the administration of International Law, but also this is the seat of government in Netherlands.
There were some cool looking objects on display in the visitors centre, but the labeling of most of these cabinets was… not great. I’ll have to do some research on them later.
After our somewhat abortive stop at the Peace Palace, we went to go find some lunch at De Pier in Scheveningen. This whole area looks like it’s trying to be a Greek or Italian beach in the Mediterranean… only it’s in the Netherlands, and this is the North fucking Sea, it’s really cold and bloody windy, and wherever you look out to sea, there are huge container ships and oil tankers seemingly barely 500m off shore! So, not quite as inviting as the huge umbrella resort style beach restaurants in southern Europe!
Still we found a nice spot, called ‘Atlantis’ for lunch… yeah, you don’t see many in-table braziers and throw rugs available in the Mediterranean either.
Lunch consisted of some delicious vintage cheese croquettes, a beef carpaccio pizza for Mr K, and a smoked salmon, Dutch shrimp and smoked eel salad for me. Super fresh and delicious.
So many kids playing on this beach like they’ve never seen sand before… and here was us rugged up in our windproof jackets. We were also the only people trying to stay out of the midday sun – pick the Queenslanders and their habitual skin cancer paranoia! No wonder Europeans come to Australia and get burned to a crisp!
After lunch, we were checking out the Madurodam transport hub before heading to Bergen op Zoom for the night. Most people visit Madurodam for the scale model / little town theme park – but not us… no, no, no. We are visiting it to gawk at transport infrastructure! lol. 😀
Bergen op Zoom is a pretty little place – it reminds me of Dresden, only smaller. The Grote Markt is a medieval town square surrounded by beautiful medieval buildings. The history of Bergen op Zoom is fairly extensive with it having been a major trading town, before becoming a garrison town. It has suffered several major fires which have seen extensive loss of historical records and considerable amount of rebuilding.
I imagine, the
The Markiezenhof gothic palace used to be a residence for local lords and Marquises of Bergen op Zoom.
After checking into one of those decidedly European hotels which has one major front door, but then is a rabbit warren of having overtaken the buildings either side of it, we went down to the square to find a drink and enjoy the evening before finding something for dinner.
Bitterballen, lobster bisque and steak entrecôte for Mr K.
Totally delicious, but was more soup than bisque and definitely more langoustine than lobster.
Back to the hotel in time to finish off some work for the evening!