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!
The Nabano no Sato illuminated gardens are a ‘must visit’ when in Nagano so I figured we needed to go visit. Given it was all happening after hours, it wasn’t too hard to set aside the evening to go out and see them. The gardens are actually attached to an enormous plant nursery and they have been lighting up paths and expanding on the attraction for years. At 2500JPY per person for the entrance fee, it’s not so cheap to just wander around and look at the lights, but it weirdly includes 1000JPY per person in vouchers that you can spend inside the park… 
Having read up on the place before coming out here, we arrived just before sunset and had a bite to eat- from what I’ve read and now from what I’ve seen, if you go wander through the park first if you want something to eat a bit later, you’ll be lining up for ages to get seated in any of the park’s restaurants. The place was BUSY – and the 5400 space car park was no where near full.
Mr K ordered a park katsu curry that was served in a huge cube of bread with a miso curry and egg. The curry was really tasty… miso curry is a popular thing in the Nagano region.
I also ordered some saké – because well, every time I look at a menu and there are no diet soft drink options, I think ‘I’ve gonna have the sugar, I may as well have the alcohol!’. This is the FIRST time ever that I have been served hot saké in Japan. Honestly, all the brewery and saké shops, and restaurants we have been to – the saké is, by default, chilled. With this one exception. 
Which got me wondering why… 
I actually asked for some ice to cool it down and see what it tasted like, as while it was hot all I could pick out was the heavy tone of ‘this is alcohol’… and yeah, it was not sweet, not dry, not citrusy, not floral, it was just kinda bland. So I can see why they heated it up. 
Through the large park is an enormous stream of hot onsen water lined with beautiful Japanese maple trees. There was a public onsen for bathing if that took your fancy, as well as further in a very popular onsen foot bath which had crowds of people using it. The stream made for some glorious opportunities for reflection photographs. But it was very hard to capture the beauty of the scene… 
Though I repeatedly tried to! So many photos of the same subject. 🙂 
There was also an enormous lake which led up to what looked like a Christian church – an yes, you can have weddings out here, or just come out and having wedding photos taken in the park. It’s popular all year round for the autumn leaves and also for the cherry blossoms and massive begonia fields. 
Attempt 53 at trying to captures the reflections of the autumn leaves in the lake…
It was actually really pretty which got me wondering why the hell do people like twinkle/fairy lights so much? What bower-bird like instinct is driving this?
So we’re not all just a bunch of nutters flocking to a Nagoya plant nursery for no reason – we’re psychologically drawn to them. 😉 #sciencebitches 
Ahhhh… a tunnel of love hearts.
In front of which you can get a professional photograph with your sweetie. 
Another tunnel – this time made to look like draping wisteria.
But the most adorable was for last – the long flower tunnel leading back around to the lake… there were two little boys running around with us in tiny little Santa suits. Their Mum chasing them with a large camera trying to get a Christmas photo of her little darlings. They were so excited and happy and much to excited to sit together for more than a fraction of a second for poor Mum to take their photo. They were so cute! 
Obligatory selfie…
Traditional feudal map of the Nagoya area… could not ascertain from the description when it was created or by whom.
Ooh, pretty garden visible from one of the internal passage ways between exhibition halls.
Multiple beds of irises that must look amazing in the spring.
