The Hague

We loaded up the bus and made our way to the Netherlands. None of us really knew what the Hague was or what was in it. Since it has “the” in front of it, at first we thought it was separate from the rest of the Netherlands, but it is just another city. It is the governmental capital of the city while Amsterdam is another type of capital, which I am not sure why. But while we were here we went to go see the Peace Palace and went inside the school of international law for a lecture. It was very informative about the different organizations inside the Peace Palace, including the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration. It is usually said that these courts are not effective since they only see about four cases in a year, but they are usually very important cases that will be used as a basis for many other court decisions around the world. I thought it was very interesting that the decisions meant anything at all. The UN does not really have any power besides kind of threatening members with economic sanctions or fines (which they will not do if you are already in bad shape), but still people adhere to the rulings because they want to be a team player.

Anyway, some people were disappointed we did not get to go into the court itself, but I thought the lecturer knew enough about it and we were already in a building next to it, so it’s not like they didn’t hear the same things they would have heard, they just wanted to physically be in that space. We also did not get to go inside the Peace Palace itself, but I was not expecting to. After the lecture and stuff, we sat outside eating ice cream and decided the key to world peace was in fact ice cream.

After the Peace Palace, we took a short ride to Amsterdam and went to our hotel and then to dinner. Dinner was pretty good, and the town at this point seemed very nice compared to what everyone was expecting it to be like. I think by now that Amsterdam has realized that most of the world thinks poorly of them and they try to make up for it when people visit. I hung around the town center and walked up and down the endless canals. There were still a lot of the same shops as in the other cities, but there were also those infamous coffee shops and lots of little tourist shops selling clogs and windmills like they had no idea about any drugs or prostitution anywhere near the city. I almost got run over by a few trams, but overall the city felt much safer than I thought it would. There were so many people around that it was hard to feel unsafe anyway, but I looked inside a coffee shop and they wouldn’t even let me see through the window long without showing them my ID. The short glimpse I got actually seemed pretty normal of a café except there were tubs of weed on the counter with all sorts of weird names. It seemed like a hoppin town but I with all the options, I don’t think I would choose to go back here before many other European cities.