A gazebo or something on the grounds of the Castle & Park at Rosendael, to which we introduced you a couple weeks ago. One thing that epitomizes having more money and power than you really need is building lovely but mostly useless little side-rooms like this, and fountainy displays such as those you’ll see below, which were apparently wondrously appealing at parties. (They were an early example of semi-automated, animated fountains that spirted in patterns, assuming I followed the Dutch only tour guide’s narration well enough. Which, to my pride, I think I actually did.) Still, it’s lovely – note the eagle on top! – and I’m the parties were enjoyable for those invited.
These are your first glimpses of the Castle and Park at Rosendael, a town just uphill from Velp where you may recall I spent two lovely nights at the end of my August bike tour of Central NL.
Although I bike past it several times a week, I guess I’ve not yet shown you the outside of Amsterdam’s Royal Palace, shown to the left here next to the 15th-century “Nieuwe Kerk,” so called b/c in the 1400s it was the new kid on the block after A’dam’s first 1306-built church, which as of this building’s opening became and has remained the “Oude Kerk.” The 1655 palace started life as a town hall – as noted in earlier posts about it. (And since their full time official residence is down in the Hague, this is really only where they do formal stuff that needs done in A’dam, I think.) I’ve sorta been waiting for the construction to finish before I took photos, but I liked how the setting sun lit this clouds on this evening, so here you go :-).
It’s the Rijksmuseum. That means “museum of the empire” pretty much, so if that ain’t royal in a country with folks in official roles who are generally recognized as being royal, then tell me how that “palace” from the prior entry in this series gets away with being a palace, hmm? And yeah, I’ll get out and do more palacy stuff again soon since it seems I’ve run through the pics from those summer expeditions :-).
We’re splurging all the remaining photos from our lovely May day-trip bike exploration to Muidersloot with this post. I’ll try to explain a few things that you may be curious about, depending what level of attention you give to these various images. Museums in the Netherlands like to do art in many ways. (The plural in Dutch is musea – which if we English speakers used a more latin-root approach I suppose we’d say too, but I think folks would laugh at me if I talked about going to several musea in a day…)
Above, you see one of the ways Muidersloot was adding contemporary art to the abundant history it always offers just being what is: installation art with a theme of rising sea levels. If you don’t get it, stop and think. It’s possible you’ll chuckle a bit. In other photos you’ll see various insect sculptures in the moat or on the grounds. While I wandered the gardens, I heard loud rumbling and noticed a pod of helicopters crossing the sky. Feeling all Apocalypse Now, I was torn between diving for cover and taking photos. The image below and a few more in the gallery demonstrate which instinct won. (And no, pods of helicopters crossing the sky are not a thing I’ve seen here before, nor do I know what this was about.)
Above you’ll see the one of the most impressive and oldest original items in this semi-royal residence museum which I’ve only shown you once before even though the visit was in late May. I’m posting just about every remaining photo from my visit to the Markiezenhof now, since I have plenty of other photos for this series and currently reside and work in a nation where royal palaces are much easier to find than mountains. Strike that: in which anything one could reasonably describe as a mountain does not in fact exist, but people considered royal and thus their residences and such are generally rather plentiful. In the gallery below you’ll see some explanations of the displays including the altar above, if you’re interested. And at the bottom is the entrance to the whole compound: apparently my trip happened on day when some commercial company had rented the entry for an event or party of some sort or other, thus the folks with drinks in hand crowding the entrance.
All from the Royal Palace in A’dam, which we showed you once before when we’d just returned from the US and had no backlog of remotely legit “royal-ish” stuff to share with you. I’ve now stocked up on royal stuff from Berlin as well as a few different corners of NL so I can just share all these overly-impressive and imposing doorways, sitting rooms, waiting rooms, etc. etc. all in one big post. Fascinating are all the coats of arms in the gallery below, with SPQA at the top. (As in, Senate & People of the City of Amsterdam in direct imitation of classical Rome’s SPQR.) I’d never noticed that before, but have since seen the same thing on a bridge or two around town. One thing I will say about constitutional monarchies such as this one: they allow the State (by which int’l law means Nation State, not New Jersey or Alaska) itself to retain a certain dignity that rises above the politics of the moment. IMHO the US has lately tended to test the value of a single person being both head of state and head of government, often with disconcerting results when it comes to the dignity of the State itself…
At the Royal Palace in A’dam (which started life as city hall back in the 1600s or so), one walks through the impressively intimidating doorway in order to pass from the main hall into the throne room. Which, on the day of my recent visit, had nothing I could identify as a throne, thus this as the most impressive royal-symbolic image from that visit: we’ve got Atlas carrying the world, and justice being meted out just below…and it’s past those eyes you must enter the throne room. I think that upstart, wannabe bus we featured in our prior post would fit easily within this hall, plenty of room to spare. Ah, the symbolism of it all, eh? 🙂
Hortus (A’dam’s botanical garden) as seen from my walk from the metro station to work the day I flew to Dhaka – the rare occasion I didn’t bike due to the luggage at had with me, hence my ability to stop and take these photos of the lovely view :-).
You’ve seen almost this exact same view under very different light conditions in an earlier post. Neal will recognize the Scheepvaartmuseum (aka National Maritime Museum), and one of the tall ships which are (I believe?) a living part of its collection.
The first time, I believe, that I’ve devoted an entry in the Small Wonders series to a human creation. But this 2000-year-old Roman wonder from the superb museum in Nijmegen captivated my spirit with its luminous beauty, to be quite honest. Roman – and other ancient or modern – glassware will sometimes have that effect on me 🙂
Museum Fundatie, in Zwolle, as promised in the last post from this lovely capital of Overijssel province. Lonely Planet tells us this was once a neoclassical courthouse which now houses exhibitions of contemporary art and has a small permanent collection which “traces the trajectory of contemporary art through representative pieces.” I was there after closing time so haven’t yet seen what’s inside, but the contemporary additions on the roof are, as promised by Lonely Planet, “impossible to miss.” Yes, that’s a large gold bird, and we’re told that the larger roof addition is a “snail-shaped slug of a cocoon that sparkles silver in the sunlight.” To me it might as well be UFO that’s perching on the roof, but either way it sparkles and attracts the eye, indubitably. 🙂 This merging of older and newer architecture is a common and often visually stimulating architectural thing here, as shown in various past posts – and certainly a thing to watch for if you visit any city in the Netherlands, more or less.
(so much world, so little time....) 