The Hagues (Netherlands)

~ youkyong

May 2025

We went.
We saw.
We have it.
This photo may not prove it, but it was never too crowded while we were there.

Where? The Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague. I used to never be a big fan of Dutch paintings, thus, we didn’t even bother to go to the Rijksmuseum while in Amsterdam on several different occasions.

But our travel mate, Yuna, wanted to meet the Girl with a Pearl Earring face to face, thus, we went to the Mauritshuis. This is a rather intimate museum where we could see the art works at our own leisurely pace.

They were working to restore a painting & let us see it through a huge glass window.
In my limited knowledge, I used to think the flowers and the fruits in Dutch paintings looked like plastic, but I discovered the vibrant colors burst out of the frames in this close encounter, and that made these objects come really alive.
People and lives depicted in this museum collection were not just about heroes or noblemen or religious themed but showed everyday lives of real people. I even found some humor in them.
The encounter with the pearl earring girl itself was much more pleasant than the one with the Mona Lisa at Louvre for sure.
We had lunch at the museum’s restaurant.
A totally artsy, pleasant place
Their food is modeled after the paintings they show at the museum, we were told. Not too expensive.

There was a huge public underground parking lot smack in the middle of downtown, and it was not too expensive. You just have to remember the staircase number that was written clearly above the exit door.

There was another art museum I wanted to check out in Hague. To get there, you walk northeast from Mauritshuis, passing through a tree lined walkway.

Admiring all sorts of are works strewn around the area
And reach the MC Escher Museum
Mathematics and art meet in Escher’s works, and the most extensive collection resides in an old royal palace in Hague.
Judging from his bio, he was a sickly artistically inclined child who didn’t do well in school. He did enroll in a school of architecture, but he quickly switched to graphic art.
Perhaps he was a mathematician intuitively but not academically.
This lady looked like she just popped out of an Escher’s work!

We walked back to the center where the Dutch government complex known as Binnenhof sits by a big pond. Written as Den Haag in Dutch, Hague is the third biggest city in the Netherlands after Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Interestingly, Amsterdam is the capital and the royal court is there, but the prime minister and the government are in Hague. Why? A long story.

An extensive renovation work was going on in the Binnenhof complex, but artists were minding their own business not bothered by the hustle bustle.

Between the pond and the old city hall, about 1 km southwest, there were all sorts of shopping streets..

.. indoor, outdood
Of course Den Haag needs K-snacks.
And here’s the old city hall.

We could have walked around some more because there was a lot more to cover. The Hague may not have a million population, but it is a big, attractive city. We didn’t get to the International Court of Justice, which probably is what the Hague is known as for most people outside of the Netherlands. But our legs said enough for the day.