Well, my plan for Easter Sunday was to check out Gouda in the morning and then to head toward The Hague and Scheveningen for the rest of the day to check out the museums and parts of town I missed the first day I was there. However, Saturday night revelry resulted in a change of plans. After sampling lots of good strong Dutch beers at The Wilde Hollander pub in Delft, a place that only carries Dutch beers but hundreds of them, on Saturday night, I found myself in a somewhat hungover and unmotivated state on Sunday morning. "Hey, what would be open on Sunday morning anyway, and are the trains even running on Easter morning?" was how I justified my sloth. I decided to drop the Gouda plans as something that just wasn't meant to be and headed toward The Hague around Noon.

My first day in The Hague I spent around the city center, but there are many sights on the cities north side as well, an area known as the International Quarter because it’s the location of the international associations based around the Peace Palace as well as the embassies of most countries to The Netherlands . This may be where The Hague is at its most elegant and refined, a mix of city and country with parks and forest preserves, both stately and modern, and very cultured.

My walk from the Central Station started through the Lange Voorhout a shaded plaza lined with neoclassical mansions where the busy Paasmarkt (Easter Market) was taking place. I managed to duck into mass at Heilige Jacobus Catholic Church just as Easter service was ending and then continued past monument, parks, and embassies to the Mesdag art sites.

Hendrik Mesdag was a wealthy banker turned painter and the best known member of the “Hague School” of artists on the 19^th century, Dutch realist painters similar to the Barbizon School of French painters of the same era. There’s not one but two Mesdag sites in the same neighborhood, the Mesdag Collection, a mansion museum he created adjacent to his house which consists of his personal collection of paintings and ceramics by a range of artists, including some of his own . The Panorama Mesdag is located a few blocks away and includes many more of his paintings, mostly of seascapes and the world of mariners and those of his wife Sientje, also an accomplished artist. The Mesdag Panorama, though, is a highly naturalistic 360 degree circular painting depicting Scheveningen in 1880 which is viewed from a platform in the center. The panorama is recognized as the largest single painting in the Netherlands.

Usually when I hear The Hague mentioned in the news it has to do with the International Criminal Court, the international organization which is supposed to hold war criminals and criminal leaders accountable for what they’ve done. The cases that come to mind are those that related to Serbia and the 1990s war in Bosnia – Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic. I hear periodically about others too, like petty African dictators or the genocide in Rwanda.

The best known building in The Hague is the Vredespaleis (Peace Palace), a neo-Renaissance style building completed in 1913 which now houses the Permanent Court of Arbitration, International Criminal Court, and several other international judicial institutions . It’s apparently possible to visit the palace on a guided tour, but those were all sold out for the day by the time I arrived in the early afternoon. Otherwise there’s no access to the grounds. You just have to gawk from outside the fence, and the visitor’s center was way too crowded for my nerves to take for more than a few minutes.

I continued my walk in the direction of the Gemeente Museum about a mile and a half away. The walk was past a forest preserve and multiple stately mansions that house the embassies of many nations. I imagine if you work for the State Department or equivalent foreign services of other countries, The Hague would be one of the most plum assignment locations.