Den Haag

Home of the ICJ. The Vredespaleis (Peace Palace---what a nice name) seems to be built in the same style as Amsterdam's Centraal station. Did Carnegie really donate that building? Or maybe they just meant he donated the funds to have the place built.
The seat of the Dutch governemnt was pretty much as described---spread-out and somewhat disorganised. A brief amble from Centraal Station brought us to the Binnenhof. In the large public square in front there was a statue of William the First; later we saw his likeness in several places around the city. The Netherland's first king, I told my parents, not entirely correctly it seems. William the First was only Stadhouder of Holland, the first from the House of Orange to hold the post. He is known as the Vader des Vaderlands not for being the first king or anything of that sort, but rather for leading the Dutch revolt against the Spanish that led to the founding of the United Provinces. Republicanism, it would seem, has deep roots in the Netherlands.

Still the House of Orange has done more here than provide royal entertainment. The Royal Picture Collection housed in the Maruitshuis had an excellent selection of Dutch Masters; Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring was much more striking and vivid than the Mona Lisa. Escher in het Paleis is sadly closed on Tuesdays, so we walked some more along the Lange Voorhout, and quite a few blocks north to the Vredespaleis, before feeling lazy and thanking our lucky stars we could take a tram back.
Courtesy of the wonder of strippenkaarten. The system can work even better than ez-link style chipcards in some respects: no worries about software problems, or forgetting to validate when alighting. The disadvantage is that it does not so much eliminate these problems as shift their burden onto the human side: now people have to figure out how to calculate their fares, and it's easier to cheat the system. It's big enough a problem for the Netherlands to plan to eventually replace them with OV-chipkaarten, something very much like an ez-link.
Den Haag is part of the Randstad, the mega-urban-agglomeration that is home to nearly half the Dutch population and one of the biggest conurbations in Europe, along with Amsterdam, Rotterdam and a few other major cities. The stretch on the railway between Amsterdam and here didn't feel too urban, though. Maybe it really did pass through the open empty spaces in the centre of the Rand ...