About the national anthem: it’s from the perspective of William of Orange, NOT from the perspective of the person singing the Wilhelmus. And a) he actually was originally from what is now Germany, b) Duits didn’t mean German at the time the Wilhelmus was written. There was no Germany back then. What Duits used to mean was: mainland Germanic south of the Danes. The English narrowed the meaning of the word Dutch to mean... well... Dutch. The Germans (Deutsch) and Dutch (Duits) narrowed it down to mean German. This narrowing down happend in the centuries after the Wilhelmus was written. There’s still this old fashioned Dutch word ‘Diets’ which is a variation of the word Duits and it means Dutch. Duits got narrowed down to mean German, Diets got narrowed down to mean Dutch. Diets has fallen out of use though. A few lines further down the Wilhelmus it says ‘the king of Spain have I always honoured’. Which doesn’t make any sense for present day Dutchies but it did for William of Orange. (And then there’re reasons given explaining why William rose against the Spanish king despite having honoured him always before)
People who do not know or are not interested in history might wonder about the king of Spain and the German blood in the Dutch anthem. They should read your explanation :-)
Perfect . i will ad some thing, diets and doots carry the same name and dialect of our roots of dutch people. Diets meaning "part of germany" and doots (is how the english people named us dutch) meaning folk "volks"
#4 Amsterdam. It's literally a swamp. All those canals are there not just to look pretty, that's actually how you 'drain the swamp'.... * crickets * But a drained swamp is still not a stable foundation to build on, so you'll need to slam some poles through the bog until you hit sand. Part of the success story of Amsterdam is that, because it used to be a swamp, no nobles or clergy had any claim to it. So when the technology to drain it was developed in the late middle ages, it had a head start as a kind of free trade area ruled by the merchant class and quickly rose to become an economic powerhouse.
I fly KLM a lot for my work and last year I was finally flown by our king from Amsterdam to Rome. He did not use the on-board PA, and the captain did not say who was first officer, but we could see him boarding with the crew from the platform. I had already been wondering about the military police with the automatic weapons at the gate, but then I understood why. He made a really smooth landing in Rome by the way. So that was a real "Royal" Dutch Airlines flight.
Fun Fact. The houses in (old) Amsterdam were build leaning forward. If you look on top of most of the buildings you see a hook. In the oldendays they used that hook to bring goods to the top floors were most of the warehouses were. Now they are still used to bring furniture up and down. And the houses are small but high (for the time they were build) because you payed tax on the wide of the building. And no one wanted to pay more tax.
The anthem thing, the Dutch national anthem predates the whole notion of "Germany" as a nation state by several centuries, so in the context of the time it was written, it means, as you correctly assumed, "I am of germanic origin", since the Netherlands are part of the germanic cultural and linguistic region. There's also a line in there about always having honored the Spanish king, which is ironic since the country was born by rebelling against the Spanish. The king the anthem refers to is the one predecessor of the king we rebelled against. The Netherlands wasn't even a monarchy back then, it was a republic. It didn't become a monarchy until after Napoleon invaded.
It's the predecessor of Philips II of Spain? I thought he meant that guy, because he had always honoured him until it was clear he was a tyrant who wanted to force catholocism on the people instead of the freedom of religion both protestants and catholics wanted and had therefore 'left the throne' (act of abjuration 1581), was no longer a legitimate king because of his own actions. He tried for years to change the king's mind and remove the Spanish Inquisition but to no effect. It was a huge thing back then, kings were absolute rulers with divine authority, he was representing him first, only became elected by the States in the office of stadtholder later. Stadtholder is not a heriditary job. So I believe he's expressing that he didn't go about independence lightheartedly or opportunistically, but in the end saw no other way than to rebel. It didn't start out as a national anthem because the concept of the nation state was still in development, by the Dutch of course. They used the song to promote the idea of all these provinces united in one to beat the evil Spanish and gain independence, it was first printed in in 1581 in the songbook of the rebels (geuzen). Independence came soon but beating the Spanish took another 80 years of war. So the song helped to create the nation rather than that the nation created a national anthem. It only became the national anthem by law in the 1930's, maybe because those republican remnants are always a bit sensitive since the monarchy. So if the Americans want to keep copying the Dutch like they did with their DOI 195 years later, they have to become a monarchy soon. We've already seen political dynasties developping in that republic, so it can't take very long anymore.
He honnered the Spanish king Phillip II because his started as an advisor when Phillip became king. Only when William became protestant things changed. Phillip took Williams son hostage and he never saw him again.
Wrong again, it does not refer to Germanic, it literally refers to the Dutch, to the different DUTCH dialects, and the DUTCH people. The reference can even be found in English and German and in both it refers to ...... Yes the Dutch,
-The king flies(flew) every 2 weeks a European flight to keep his licence up to date. He will use the name W.A. van Buren. He is also count van Buren. -Most houses in the west of the country are built on concrete polls. The are stamped so deep they stand on a hard layer of underground. Otherwise everything would sink into the sand. As you sayed, there is many reclamed land. That's all sand, not stone. -About the anthem. What we sing are the words of Willem of Orange, its his text and he says: Willíam of Nassau, I am of German blood. It means more or less: I am Willem and I was born in a family who comes from the lower parts of Germany. Not the state Germany, thats didn't excist up to the 1880s. The anthem has 15 verses. When you take each first letter you get the word WILLEM VAN NASSOV. The first verse is sung most times, and sometimes (in church) the 6th one. Its about Williams confession to God, how he has trust in him. The rest fof the verses are about the story of the 80-years war, how he lost his brothers in battle, etc.
Fact.....most houses in the netherlands are build on heipalen....old systems used wood because that was Est at the time. The reason is that this way the houses stand on the hardest ground deep inside the soil. The top is to soft. Will the houses fall over? Nope. Moderne houses do that sooner...even in the usa....then these old houses.
Actually most wooden poles don't hit solid (sand) ground; the wooden poles aren't tall enough for that in many places. They are literally floating in the soft ground. They give support by 'sticking' to the soft grond (op "kleef"). Friction resistance is not an optimal solution as some spots are weaker and sink faster. Hence the crooked houses in many cities. Not sure where you get the idea that modern houses fall over more quickly, that's simply uninformed nonsense. Current heipalen are always made from armored concrete and always hit the hard ground, so they are rock solid. A further issue with wooden poles is wood-rot. Especially since we have a sewerage the gaps between the sewerage elements causes the ground water to drain, exposing the top part of the wooden poles to air (and starting the rotting process). So reality is even scarier then many imagine, the poles are floating in soft peat grond and exposed to moisture and air since ground water levels nowadays are lower then when the houses were built.
Below sea level is half the story. The NL is the flood plane of large European rivers Rhine and Meuse, plus lesser ones like IJssel at Schelde. It also is the flood plane of the North Sea over that river delta. Now imagine the pumps stop that keep our feet dry in claimed land. Water management has its own government here, with its own elections. Imagine regular politics with their compromises would govern that - a nightmare. "More land" may not have been the reason to claim land from water, but getting rid of swamp fever (brought by midges). Land was a benefit, though, and became an important driver.
During the first years of the 1950's one could get the endemic dutch malaria (especially in areas around Amsterdam): www.lumc.nl/org/parasitologie/patient-en-zorg/Meerinformatieoverparasieten/Malaria/Malaria-in-Nederland-vroeger-en-nu/
The length of the poles under our houses depend on how deep the layer of sand beneath is. A sand layer forms the stable setting in an otherwise mushy soil make up.
Out national anthem is about Wilhelm van Oranje. In the past "Duits" meant "common people". So the first line of the enthem says: Willem van Oranje is a man of the people. (although he was nobility)
Originally Duits means common people, that is the word “Diutisc” and this word goes back to the 10th century. Wilhelmus van Nassouwe is a German and from German blood, Nassau is not far from Frankfurt. So the Dutch Americano is right: we all sing that we are from German blood. Anyway the dutch are a Germanic people.
As said, the anthem describes Willem van Oranje-Nassau, not the general Dutchman/woman. The Nassaus are from the town of Dillenburg Germany. He was born there in 1533. There was their home castle which is gone, instead they built the Wilhelmsturm to remember the Nassaus, which is a museum now and shows portraits of familiar people in Dutch history, so really cool to visit.
With the mountain thing, I think it's also that language also has a cultural component, and if your country is relatively flat it makes sense that you use the terms differently that make more sense in the context of the country, and thus the highest/steepest parts of your country is what you call mountains, and then you use hill for something between that and completely flat. Meanwhile, if you live in a place with a lot of height variation, you'd probably have a looser definition of flat then we use in the Netherlands; what we call hills you might call flat, what we call mountains you call hills, and what we call flat is just beyond you, and what you call mountains is beyond us.
King still is an employee, he was recently retrained for either the 727 or 737 since they retired the Fokkers. Most if not all have a job. Amsterdam was for a large part but not entirely built on poles. Many are rotting now, some being replaced by concrete, but it is hard, time consuming and very expensive and they took measures to not lose more divers making it even more expensive.
I was always told, that the longest "heipalen" are used in Overveen, close to Haarlem. They are building on veen=peat, hence the name and the poles are 27 meters long. that is how deep the alluvial sand layers are sturdy enough for the poles. there is even an building with 4 basement layers, that floats on the peat like a ship!
@beek: I seem to know that the concrete poles used in Amsterdam are 30 m long. They have to reach the "derde zandlaag": the third layer of sand to be met when drilling down through the peat. I'm sure that some of the high buildings in Rotterdam would stand on even longer concrete poles. I wouldn't be surprized if similar sizes could also be found in the "swampier" parts of The Hague and Utrecht. How about places like Singapore and Hong Kong? On the "floating": a major problem building the metro tunnels of Amsterdam was keeping those huge concrete boxes down. (Archimedes' Law)
And as long as the groundwater level stays up, those poles will be there for a long time still. Once the water level goes down for a significant amount of time, they'll start to rot, though, and buildings will start to sag, as their foundations disappear.
About the mountain part... You've got to see it through our eyes to understand what we mean. Most of the Netherlands is flat and sure we only have hills. But relative to what we are used to Limburg has some mountains. Which doesn't mean we are not familiar with the mount Everest ;) Try taking the non electric bike out and ride up that vaalserberg and I'm sure you'll see it as a mountain too :)
I was born in Muiderberg, a town next to the city of Muiden. probably as high as 5ft. Correct me if I'm wrong. then we moved to Hilversum. Part of that was Trompenberg, there again you would never know if you passed it
The wooden poles don't rot, for the water level in the ground is kept high enough and standing in water they won't rot. Also some to know, they drill the hole, then throw in cow hides and such, then put the pole in and that hole filled up with water, only the top needed to be protected by something I forgot, for that was dry.
It's still very strange for me. . But the line that we honored the Spanish King is even more strange. especially if you are living in Breda where i live.
If you havent been there yet don't forget to visit the 'little switzerland' area in the very south of our tiny country with it's just as tiny range of not mountains. You will probably notice the difference with the rest of the Netherlands. Do a tour below the Maastricht/Valkenburg line and visit country side villages. If you feel confident and exercised enough perhaps even do the tour on bike so you can tell how 1000ft hills can feel like mountains after all :).
To a lot of Dutch people (I guess especially the ones who travel a lot) a hill of 320 m isn't really a mountain either... But that's what you get when your country really is that flat. I've watched a lot of your videos back to back now, and I have to say, I love your content! It's really fun and interesting to see what an expat thinks of our country. I'm glad you feel so positive about our home. We complain a lot (another thing the Dutch like to do), but I really believe that the Netherlands is one of the best places in the world to live. Sure, I'm a little biased, but still. I hope you have a lot of good years to come in our humble little country. And please keep it up with the awesoome content! You present it in a really fun, genuine and casual way and I even learned some new stuff about my on country. How cool is that?!
Not only Amsterdam is built on poles, a large part of the country is. The ground is too soft to build on directly, if you do that it would just sink into the ground. In the past they used wooden poles, so in most of the old parts of city's there are still buildings on wooden poles. But today we use concrete poles, in Dutch they are called heipalen. They are used to transfer the weight to a sand layer somewhere between 5 en 20 meters down
The Dutch national anthem is a battle hymn from the 80 year war, which is right at the origin of the country. The Dutch provinces had been completely autonomous before, but were now under Spanish control. There's a reference to honoring the Spanish king in there because it was the duke ruling here that was so hated, not the Spanish king. It's sung from the perspective of the one organizing our side of the war, who later more or less founded the country and is the ancestor of our royal family. One of the titles he held was related to a region of modern-day France called "Orange", which is where the Dutch association with that color comes from. He was actually from Nassau, which is in modern-day Germany, though. However, the Netherlands had not been founded yet, and the term Diets actually referred to the Germanic area of Europe at the time, which includes both current day Germany and the Netherlands. That word is the origin of "Deutsch", "Deutschland", "Dutch" and that part of the national anthem.
Related to the reclamed land: At Neeltje Jans (part of the Delta works) the side of the building says "Hier gaan over het tij de maan, de wind en wij" meaning "over here the tide is ruled by the moon, the wind and us"
Hé, don’t mess with our king ;-). We are proud of our monarchy (well at least most of us) though it’s mostly ceremonial. And we do get a day off, wear our orange hats and shirts again and get wasted at 3 pm....
Carrots can be white, yellow, orange, purple or blackish, or combinations of these colors. A minute detail which is overlooked is the Netherlands control a very large part of seed development and crossbreeding techniques to improve both the productivity as the resistance against pests and diseases of an enormous amount of crops... This also includes GMO and single use hybrids, but understand crossbreeding is genetic modification ( only through trial and error) as well. Humans have tried to select the strongest plants for 1000s of years now, so this isn't a new development as such. Orange carrots were a gift to the Dutch monarchy by Dutch seed growers, and the fact most people do not know there are other color products is partly because of good marketing techniques and a superior product. Houses in Amsterdam are built on marshy land, without poles the houses topple or sink. The King of The Netherlands is from the house of Orange Nassau which has it's roots traceable to it's creation in 1515, where a German nobleman and a French Noblewoman were wed, and their respective lands of Nassau and Orange were merged. More info on Wikipedia. The highest point of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is actually Mount Scenery (883m) on the Island Saba in the Carribean. As Saba is seen as a municipality it's formally part of the Netherlands.
I am from german blood is spoken out in the person of William of Orange, our founding father, which was actually a Herman prince ego tot Holland as a present.
The Dutch was a part of the German empire for a few 100years, we were all German in Europe once, the anthem is so old, that song was written ages ago, when that German empire was not as long ago. Great video.,
I live in Assen and we have this really small hill here, you can literally walk up it in less than a minute an we call it the pitteloose berg(pitteloose mountain)
Those poles are driven into the swamp, so, the houses are build "on poles" partly, and partly on mud.. the poles connect the sandy underground and the houses...these days concrete poles...
One of the reasons king Willem-Alexander flies for KLM is to maintain his Air Transport Pilot License. But he can only fly aircraft commercially, with crew and passengers, if he regularly does do such flights and if he's knowledgeable enough about the type of airplane he flies. He used to fly Fokker 70s but the KLM stopped using that type of airplane and he now flies Boeing 737s. About our national anthem, the original line was "Ben ick van Duytschen bloet" The word Duytsch here means something different than 'German'. It's the name for the language the people of the Eastern and Northeastern low lands spoke that spoke a German accent. There was also Dietsch, which was the name for the German accents in the Southern and Western low lands. At the time the anthem was created, the Netherlands in its current form didn't yet exist as a nation and the Dutch language didn't exist as well. There was more of a spread of local dialects which from region to region sounded very similar but were quite different on both ends. From the low lands towards the Alps where the low lands spoke Diets, Duuts, and eventually, high German. When viewed politically all these lands were part of the holy roman empire. Some, like the Netherlands were held by the king of Spain (one of the major Habsburg branches), others by local lords, Prussia or another major Habsburg branch which was also the king of Austria. It was a patchwork of small nations. The Dutch got fed up with the Spanish Habsburgs and fought a war of independence for which Willem van Nassau was the leader. He is the founding father of the Dutch monarchy, although it took a few generations to get there. His official estate, Nassau, actually does lie in modern day Germany. But the current house of Orange-Nassau (family name of the Dutch monarchy) doesn't hold lands there any more.
Our country on the west/north is sinking in for centuries. It´s a river delta. Therefore it is relatively easy to reclaim land. In Florida it is about the opposite, the sea rises up from under the land.
The _Official_ translation of the first verse of our anthem is as follows: William of Nassau, scion Of a Dutch and ancient line, I dedicate undying Faith to this land of mine. A prince I am, undaunted, Of Orange, ever free, To the king of Spain I've granted A lifelong loyalty.
Hi Eva, the 1st verse not only says: “I am of German blood” (true for the house of Orange) but also “I have always honored the king of Spain”. The latter has a nice connection with the1581 "Act of Abjuration" (google it): As this king didn’t serve his subjects well, he “lost” his rights - we declared our independence! Because of resemblances in the text it is speculated that Thomas Jefferson had a copy of the "Act of Abjuration" when he drafted the American Declaration of Independence.
About the mountain thing: You know how eskimos have a bunch of different words for snow because they have so much snow? Well we have the opposite of that with height differences. While the word 'mountain' and dutch word 'berg' technically translate to eachother, they don't quite mean the same thing. I typically associate a much larger structure with the word mountain, wherease the word berg doesn't really have to refer to something very large. In some ways 'pile' or 'heap' might be a better translation for 'berg'. For instance I would never call a 1 meter high pile of sand a mountain but in dutch you would call it "een berg zand". So no, we are not calling vaalserberg a mountain, you are, we call it a berg, which doesn't quite mean the same thing but there is no better translation.
He is referring to the Haarlemmermeerpolder :) Also a region which used to be water and is drained more than 100 years ago. I'd like to recommend you, Eva, to visit the Cruquius museum, close to Haarlem. There you can see how they actually drained the whole area, by pumping up more than 300.000 liters (70.000 gallons?) per minute and transporting it into the specially build Ringvaart. Very interesting to see :)
About the poles; Amsterdam is not as unique in that way as you might think. Lots of cities are in some degree built on poles. It either be because of being built in a swamp, like Amsterdam, or being build around or even on top of at river, like Antwerp. Next to Amsterdam, Venice is of course also entirely built on poles.
We have purple food in NL, including carrots, culliflower (Bloemkool), eggplant (aubergine), cabbage (kool), and beets. Most poles are replaced by concrete nowadays.
About the poles Amsterdam resides on. This is not only Amsterdam a lot of old cities are build on wooden poles, because it all used to be swampy marshy area
Re: mountains and hills, check out the fun little movie “The Englishman who went up a mountain and came down a hill”. But basically, above 300m can be called a mountain.
"Dutch people with nothing to do converted water to land" well that is not really how this originates. Look at a very old map of the Netherlands. You will see that there were very many inland lakes, especially in Noord- and Zuid-Holland (e.g. around Amsterdam). These lakes had very shallow borders, more like a beach. Whenever there was a storm, the water would wash over the borders and cause local flooding. That of course was a nuisance so those were pumped dry and converted to land. You will find many regions with a name ending in "meer" (lake) which originally were lakes. The Flevoland province is a bit of a different thing, that was really made on purpose to gain land. But that was centuries later.
Like Stefan Peerboom said, back when the Dutch national anthem was written, there was no Germany :) Almost 99,9% of the Dutch people don't give a crap about the whole Dutch anthem, but even more (yes more) don't even know the origin of the line 'ben ik van Duitsen bloed'.
Do you know the reason the king flies for KLM? Its not like.. he has a job... but the royal aircraft was a Boeing 737 (i forgot the new type, it similar though)., and he likes to fly it himself. But in order to keep your type rating, you have a minimum amount of flight hours in that aircraft type you have to do each year. So he flies for the KLM as well on the side just to keep his rating. I remember debates in politics when the KLM was ordering a new aircraft type, and the king supposedly having to been involved in that decision because he wanted to fly a specific type, but then KLM would have to use those as well, so he could keep certified for it :D (haven't seen proof for it though)
Another funny fact: Do you know where the name Holland came from? The name Holland first appeared in sources for the region around Haarlem, and by 1064 was being used as the name of the entire county. By the early twelfth century, the inhabitants of Holland were called Hollandi in a Latin text. Holland is derived from the Old Dutch term holtlant ("wood-land"). Wood land, where are these woods? It is countryside and cows every where!
German is nowadays only used to refer to the German people and the German language. The word Diets and the use of German to refer to the Dutch people and the Dutch language have both become obsolete. However, when one speaks of Diets in the proper sense, this never refers to German, but to (southern) Middle Dutch. Diets never mean modern German, but earlier German could also mean Diets.
Heh, we have 200 foot hills that carry the word berg (mountain) in their name.As a Dutchman, i consider everything over 15 feet a hill! Technically though, anything over 500 meters high we consider a (small) mountain.
Another nice fact is that the Dutch invented the first stock market. Also don't agree with the term reclaimed land because it was never land. We just kicked the sea out.
Actually, much of the land we reclaimed was indeed 'land' (peaty marches), but the peat was washed away during a number of devastating floods after 1000. Especially the Allerheiligenvloed in 1170, and 3 more massive floods in the next 50 years.
A pilot has to do a certain amount of flying hours to keep his license and so does our king. That’s why he often is a pilot. The British royals are from German blood; a lot of European royals are. Most of the country is flat but just visit the region of Nijmegen or the south of Limburg where it’s different.
About those wooden poles: Without these poles the buildings would be sinking into the soil. The soil is to set ft to carry any buildings. So what th these poles the drilled them down until the found a hard surface. This technology is still used today but the wooden poles have been replaced since the midst of last century bi concrete poles. So the assumption that Amsterdam and other cities are build on wooden poles is incorrect. It is only in the older parts of the city.
First of all Willem-Alexander had this job on the side before he became king. An efficient way to keep your license valid. Before that he flew small bush planes in Africa for a doctors service. As for the monarchy system: a king like the ones on Europe has no actual power, he is a figurehead. A comparison with an executive president like the American one is fully beside the point.
Aah, the wooden poles. I believe they're slowly changing those into concrete or something because the wood rots when it comes into contact with ait. And that whole anthem gets weirder with: De koning van Hispanje heb ik altijd geeerd. (I've always honoured the king of Spain). At least the Duitschen Bloed references being Germanic (which we still are even if the wording is slightly strange). All the house wars that happened over Europe in the past don't make it make a lot of sense that someone would've always honoured the king of Spain, not even in the time it was written and the person it was written for.
Im an Dutch man with imsomnia and binge- watched all of your 6 longgggggggggggg vids:) and subscribed.. I kinda liked it to watch them... Enjoy your stay in our small and weird country..
The houses in Amsterdam are so crooked because of the way they used to (and still do often) move furniture in and out. All the houses have a hook high up, it's used to lift furniture up and in. Hence the large windows, so furniture can fit through. Due to years and years of lifting furniture, these houses became crooked. Another weird fact
Reclaiming land started way earlier than Flevoland. Schiphol is for example situated in a polder. And we are not singing of German blood. It’s from duitschen bloed, and why do you think the Dutch are called Dutch? Duitsch is an old-Dutch word for the people in the Netherlands. So the English name comes from the Dutch word Duitsch. Germany, or Duitsland, didn’t even exist in the time the Wilhelmus was written.
The reason the king flew for KLM is mainly that the official government plane which is also used as the royal private jet (I mean, why not combine the functions, neither use needs it *all* the time) was a Fokker mumblety, and the king - from well before he was king, just crown prince then - enjoys flying his family as pilot. But to do so you need not only a commercial pilot’s license but also a type rating for that Fokker and to maintain that requires flying that plane once every month. He could do that by taking joyrides in the government plane but why the hell not do some regular passenger flights to Manchester or whatever? Then you get paid, instead of having to pay the fuel yourself. It was not a coincidence that the government plane was the same type as the KLM CityHopper fleet (short haul in small planes). KLM also did the maintenance for the government plane while they were doing it for their own fleet. But KLM decided to replace their Fokker fleet (which was aging, and Fokker went completely bankrupt in.... I wanna say the 90s) with Brazilian Embraer jets. The replacement government plane - not finished yet I believe - was also ordered from the same stuff that KLM already uses, but this time they went for a bigger 737 instead of an Embraer. And also I think it’s a secondhand 737 retired form passenger service, but not sure on that one. I would bet that Alex is working hard on his 737 type rating, by now, unless he’s decided to give up that particular hobby now that he is king and father and has two real jobs that take up most of his time.
Though we are technically a Monarchy (which was imposed on us after the defeat of Napoleon by the British. Napoleon took our country in 1798 and put his brother on the throne of a new Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1806 until he merged it into France proper in 1810 after he found his brother siding more with the Dutch than the interests of France). Before that we were a republic. The British insisted on having a buffer state against the French, so they merged the former Dutch Republic and what is now Belgium into a new country. And as they where a Monarchy themselves, they installed a Monarch as its leader: William I, son of the former stadhouder (an elected leader of the Republic, but commonly from the house of Orange-Nassau). As he was also Grand Duke of Luxembourg, his rule stretched the area now commonly called the BeNeLux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg). Unfortunately for him the parts that form Belgium hadn't been culturally part of The Netherlands since the rebellion against Spain in 1568, and so there was a large resentment in those parts against Dutch rule (mostly due to the influence of the Walloon aristocracy, who spoke French). William I treated them as inferiors, which led them to revolt in 1830, and after 9 years of war he finally accepted their independence. Meanwhile the Parliament decided that having a Monarch with a lot of power was a bad thing, so they slowly but surely started a process to remove power from the Monarch, which led to a redrafting of our constitution in 1848 (needed to remove all references to the Belgian territories anyway) starting the process of moving power from the Monarch to the Parliament. As such the Monarch has mostly a ceremonial role as an Ambassador for our country, but no real actual power. So it's better to say that we are a Parliamentary Democracy with a Monarch than a Monarchy.
Willem van Oranje (Dillenburg, Germany, April 24, 1533 - Delft, July 10, 1584) is the Dutch father of the fatherland, and the founder of the House of Orange. This is why im from German blood
I don't know anyone already mentioned the fact that William of Oranges most used language was French. Learned at the court of Charles the fifth. That is also why his last words were in French.
re #3. It will surprise you to learn that oranges also had different colours, yellow, ocre, deep red even. But the orange ones were preferred. I don't know whether the Dutch were involved but in the 17th century we were at war with Spain and the princes leading the liberation revolt were all of the family "Orange", like today. And the 'apples' coming from Spain, Valencia mainly, were called 'apples of Orange". This appealed to patriotic feelings. We would not care for any other 'apples from Spain' than the orange coloured ones, that goes without saying, doesn't it?. Our flag used to be orange-white-blue but today it is red-white-blue, I don't know why.
every 'heap of land' that sticks out more then 200 meter above the landscape around it is defined as 'berg' (mountain), everything below that is technically a hill, I think. And since the vaalserberg is about 322m above sea level, that would make it a berg. I would like to see what you think about metric vs the mile (etc) system, did it confuse you? which one makes more sense to you?
We call that a mountain, because we have a lot of hills and we want to make a difference between a larger hill and just a small hill. Especially for people on a bicycle. So that they know what they are up to. We know it's not really a mountain.
In the part 'Ben ik van Duitschen bloed' the word 'Duitschen' doesn't refer to German but to the medieval word 'Diets'. nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diets en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology_of_the_Low_Countries
To expand on Stefan's comment: It indeed does not mean "German" blood. "Duitsen" is the same word as dutch, Duits en diets, and it means "volk", as in people. Germany is called Deutschland in the German language, which simply means "The land of the people". Diets can also mean the language of the people, which is different from what the monarchs spoke. In it's meaning of "people", Duits/Deutsch refers to the unity of different states in Germany. One people, united in one country. Likewise, "ben ik van Duitsen bloed" should be understood as "I genetically belong to this people." So our national anthem is not referring to out neighboring country, but simply has racism as it's first line.
It is funny thing about the national anthem. The first king of the netherlands used to be of german roots. The other line about that we honor the spanish king is also a thing of that time. The netherlands was at that moment a part of spain so that was why we honored him. After we defeated the spanish because we wanted independence we still had a close relation with them, sort of. That is why the anthem stayed the same out of respect an love for the country and history
Willem van Oranje was NEVER a king. He was Prince of Orange, and became Stadhouder (placeholder) for Holland and most other provinces. Stadhouder-ship became a more or less hereditary title (it caused regular conflicts between supporters of the Republic and supporters of the Oranje-Nassau's). Initially, the Dutch provinces sought to get some other nobles interested in becoming king, but most of them messed up, or were not too interested. But Willem van Oranje was just intended to be a temporary leader.
As I am from german blood, I have no problem with that sentence. I do have problems with the monarchy (the whole idea of the Netherlands was to have a republic). The national anthem refers to William of Orange, who was of german blood. So it makes sense as such.
The whole idea was not to have a republic, but to get rid of spanish rule. Initially, lordship was offered to Queen Elizabeth I of England (who was an ally) by the dutch nobles, but she refused. This left no other option than to continue without one. Btw, imagine Queen Elizabeth I accepting..
Ik ben van Duitse bloed klopt omdat willem van oranje duits was en hij heeft het geschreven. Ze hebben ook nog een groot stuk land in Frankrijk (orange) vandaar de naam oranje 😁
Study the Athem a bit more carefully. The Royal family has historic links to Germany and France. (French County of Orange is where our national colour came from, and the melody is of an old French military marching song)
the Dutch engineers worked in New Orleans when their land was drowning and also in new york not so long ago for the same reason, these engineers are for hire for Florida but the rather wait till the damage is done
We were part of Germania, all sorts of different ''tribes'', with land ranging from England up to Scandinavia etc etc, and i personally cannot be proud of it (why would i ?) it's just a fact, but i'm glad we do.
The national anthem. In the medieval age Germany and The Netherlands were together. So everybody in that area was Dutch. In English language Dutch remained and is connected to the Netherlands and in other languages Dutch (Deutsch) remained and is connected to Germany. International European borders changed all the time. When the anthem was written the King of Spain ruled in The Netherlands. And since this anthem is extremely old these versus are in there.
The 'German' part in our natiional anthem does not relate to Germany. It is 'Diets' in the song, which is an old word for 'people'. It has been an enthonym for many Germanic peoples in the past.
About the national anthem:
it’s from the perspective of William of Orange, NOT from the perspective of the person singing the Wilhelmus. And
a) he actually was originally from what is now Germany,
b) Duits didn’t mean German at the time the Wilhelmus was written. There was no Germany back then. What Duits used to mean was: mainland Germanic south of the Danes. The English narrowed the meaning of the word Dutch to mean... well... Dutch. The Germans (Deutsch) and Dutch (Duits) narrowed it down to mean German. This narrowing down happend in the centuries after the Wilhelmus was written. There’s still this old fashioned Dutch word ‘Diets’ which is a variation of the word Duits and it means Dutch. Duits got narrowed down to mean German, Diets got narrowed down to mean Dutch. Diets has fallen out of use though.
A few lines further down the Wilhelmus it says ‘the king of Spain have I always honoured’. Which doesn’t make any sense for present day Dutchies but it did for William of Orange. (And then there’re reasons given explaining why William rose against the Spanish king despite having honoured him always before)
I was formulating a decent answer in my head, and wanted to mention the spanish line ,.. but this is it
Someone did his homework. But it’s correct!
Let me add to the the confusion by mentioning that the princedom of Orange is and was French territory.
People who do not know or are not interested in history might wonder about the king of Spain and the German blood in the Dutch anthem. They should read your explanation :-)
Perfect . i will ad some thing, diets and doots carry the same name and dialect of our roots of dutch people. Diets meaning "part of germany" and doots (is how the english people named us dutch) meaning folk "volks"
#4 Amsterdam. It's literally a swamp. All those canals are there not just to look pretty, that's actually how you 'drain the swamp'.... * crickets *
But a drained swamp is still not a stable foundation to build on, so you'll need to slam some poles through the bog until you hit sand.
Part of the success story of Amsterdam is that, because it used to be a swamp, no nobles or clergy had any claim to it. So when the technology to drain it was developed in the late middle ages, it had a head start as a kind of free trade area ruled by the merchant class and quickly rose to become an economic powerhouse.
They need canals in Westminster and Washington.
@@woutervanr Hard to build canals that big tho. * more crickets *
I fly KLM a lot for my work and last year I was finally flown by our king from Amsterdam to Rome.
He did not use the on-board PA, and the captain did not say who was first officer, but we could see him boarding with the crew from the platform.
I had already been wondering about the military police with the automatic weapons at the gate, but then I understood why.
He made a really smooth landing in Rome by the way.
So that was a real "Royal" Dutch Airlines flight.
So that's how that works!
Nice video, but please for the next one, adjust the audio level. It is much lower volume then the commercials.
Fun Fact. The houses in (old) Amsterdam were build leaning forward. If you look on top of most of the buildings you see a hook. In the oldendays they used that hook to bring goods to the top floors were most of the warehouses were. Now they are still used to bring furniture up and down. And the houses are small but high (for the time they were build) because you payed tax on the wide of the building. And no one wanted to pay more tax.
The more videos i watch you talk about The Netherlands, the more i get the idea you love it here ;-)
The anthem thing, the Dutch national anthem predates the whole notion of "Germany" as a nation state by several centuries, so in the context of the time it was written, it means, as you correctly assumed, "I am of germanic origin", since the Netherlands are part of the germanic cultural and linguistic region.
There's also a line in there about always having honored the Spanish king, which is ironic since the country was born by rebelling against the Spanish. The king the anthem refers to is the one predecessor of the king we rebelled against. The Netherlands wasn't even a monarchy back then, it was a republic. It didn't become a monarchy until after Napoleon invaded.
It's the predecessor of Philips II of Spain? I thought he meant that guy, because he had always honoured him until it was clear he was a tyrant who wanted to force catholocism on the people instead of the freedom of religion both protestants and catholics wanted and had therefore 'left the throne' (act of abjuration 1581), was no longer a legitimate king because of his own actions. He tried for years to change the king's mind and remove the Spanish Inquisition but to no effect. It was a huge thing back then, kings were absolute rulers with divine authority, he was representing him first, only became elected by the States in the office of stadtholder later. Stadtholder is not a heriditary job. So I believe he's expressing that he didn't go about independence lightheartedly or opportunistically, but in the end saw no other way than to rebel.
It didn't start out as a national anthem because the concept of the nation state was still in development, by the Dutch of course. They used the song to promote the idea of all these provinces united in one to beat the evil Spanish and gain independence, it was first printed in in 1581 in the songbook of the rebels (geuzen). Independence came soon but beating the Spanish took another 80 years of war. So the song helped to create the nation rather than that the nation created a national anthem. It only became the national anthem by law in the 1930's, maybe because those republican remnants are always a bit sensitive since the monarchy.
So if the Americans want to keep copying the Dutch like they did with their DOI 195 years later, they have to become a monarchy soon. We've already seen political dynasties developping in that republic, so it can't take very long anymore.
@@DenUitvreter maybe the fact they have a king prevents them voting for idiots in it for the money?
He honnered the Spanish king Phillip II because his started as an advisor when Phillip became king. Only when William became protestant things changed. Phillip took Williams son hostage and he never saw him again.
@@DenUitvreter King Donald and Queen Melania
Wrong again, it does not refer to Germanic, it literally refers to the Dutch, to the different DUTCH dialects, and the DUTCH people. The reference can even be found in English and German and in both it refers to ...... Yes the Dutch,
-The king flies(flew) every 2 weeks a European flight to keep his licence up to date. He will use the name W.A. van Buren. He is also count van Buren.
-Most houses in the west of the country are built on concrete polls. The are stamped so deep they stand on a hard layer of underground. Otherwise everything would sink into the sand. As you sayed, there is many reclamed land. That's all sand, not stone.
-About the anthem. What we sing are the words of Willem of Orange, its his text and he says: Willíam of Nassau, I am of German blood. It means more or less: I am Willem and I was born in a family who comes from the lower parts of Germany. Not the state Germany, thats didn't excist up to the 1880s. The anthem has 15 verses. When you take each first letter you get the word WILLEM VAN NASSOV. The first verse is sung most times, and sometimes (in church) the 6th one. Its about Williams confession to God, how he has trust in him. The rest fof the verses are about the story of the 80-years war, how he lost his brothers in battle, etc.
Fact.....most houses in the netherlands are build on heipalen....old systems used wood because that was Est at the time.
The reason is that this way the houses stand on the hardest ground deep inside the soil. The top is to soft.
Will the houses fall over? Nope. Moderne houses do that sooner...even in the usa....then these old houses.
Actually most wooden poles don't hit solid (sand) ground; the wooden poles aren't tall enough for that in many places. They are literally floating in the soft ground. They give support by 'sticking' to the soft grond (op "kleef"). Friction resistance is not an optimal solution as some spots are weaker and sink faster. Hence the crooked houses in many cities. Not sure where you get the idea that modern houses fall over more quickly, that's simply uninformed nonsense. Current heipalen are always made from armored concrete and always hit the hard ground, so they are rock solid.
A further issue with wooden poles is wood-rot. Especially since we have a sewerage the gaps between the sewerage elements causes the ground water to drain, exposing the top part of the wooden poles to air (and starting the rotting process). So reality is even scarier then many imagine, the poles are floating in soft peat grond and exposed to moisture and air since ground water levels nowadays are lower then when the houses were built.
There is a song of Nits (a Dutch band) that's called: 'In The Dutch Mountains'...
That's a metaphor for the concrete and brick buildings in Amsterdam though.
Please turn the volume up. I have my speakers and UA-cam volume setting maxed and still you are on whispering level.
Like your blog! Note that Willem Alexander never says his name when flying, so normally the passangers don't know that he is the pilot.
Below sea level is half the story. The NL is the flood plane of large European rivers Rhine and Meuse, plus lesser ones like IJssel at Schelde. It also is the flood plane of the North Sea over that river delta.
Now imagine the pumps stop that keep our feet dry in claimed land.
Water management has its own government here, with its own elections. Imagine regular politics with their compromises would govern that - a nightmare.
"More land" may not have been the reason to claim land from water, but getting rid of swamp fever (brought by midges). Land was a benefit, though, and became an important driver.
During the first years of the 1950's one could get the endemic dutch malaria (especially in areas around Amsterdam): www.lumc.nl/org/parasitologie/patient-en-zorg/Meerinformatieoverparasieten/Malaria/Malaria-in-Nederland-vroeger-en-nu/
The length of the poles under our houses depend on how deep the layer of sand beneath is. A sand layer forms the stable setting in an otherwise mushy soil make up.
Out national anthem is about Wilhelm van Oranje. In the past "Duits" meant "common people". So the first line of the enthem says: Willem van Oranje is a man of the people. (although he was nobility)
Originally Duits means common people, that is the word “Diutisc” and this word goes back to the 10th century. Wilhelmus van Nassouwe is a German and from German blood, Nassau is not far from Frankfurt. So the Dutch Americano is right: we all sing that we are from German blood. Anyway the dutch are a Germanic people.
@@2500dozo Of course did our Willempie come from Germany. But in the meaning of the anthem it means "of common blood"
As said, the anthem describes Willem van Oranje-Nassau, not the general Dutchman/woman. The Nassaus are from the town of Dillenburg Germany. He was born there in 1533. There was their home castle which is gone, instead they built the Wilhelmsturm to remember the Nassaus, which is a museum now and shows portraits of familiar people in Dutch history, so really cool to visit.
With the mountain thing, I think it's also that language also has a cultural component, and if your country is relatively flat it makes sense that you use the terms differently that make more sense in the context of the country, and thus the highest/steepest parts of your country is what you call mountains, and then you use hill for something between that and completely flat. Meanwhile, if you live in a place with a lot of height variation, you'd probably have a looser definition of flat then we use in the Netherlands; what we call hills you might call flat, what we call mountains you call hills, and what we call flat is just beyond you, and what you call mountains is beyond us.
It's so fun you mention these things, we are so used to them we find them 'normaal' but they are actually kinda cool ;)
Fun fact: although we are a weird monarchy now (and have been for a few centuries) we actually were one of the first republics.
King still is an employee, he was recently retrained for either the 727 or 737 since they retired the Fokkers. Most if not all have a job.
Amsterdam was for a large part but not entirely built on poles. Many are rotting now, some being replaced by concrete, but it is hard, time consuming and very expensive and they took measures to not lose more divers making it even more expensive.
I was always told, that the longest "heipalen" are used in Overveen, close to Haarlem. They are building on veen=peat, hence the name and the poles are 27 meters long. that is how deep the alluvial sand layers are sturdy enough for the poles. there is even an building with 4 basement layers, that floats on the peat like a ship!
@beek: I seem to know that the concrete poles used in Amsterdam are 30 m long. They have to reach the "derde zandlaag": the third layer of sand to be met when drilling down through the peat. I'm sure that some of the high buildings in Rotterdam would stand on even longer concrete poles. I wouldn't be surprized if similar sizes could also be found in the "swampier" parts of The Hague and Utrecht. How about places like Singapore and Hong Kong?
On the "floating": a major problem building the metro tunnels of Amsterdam was keeping those huge concrete boxes down. (Archimedes' Law)
And as long as the groundwater level stays up, those poles will be there for a long time still. Once the water level goes down for a significant amount of time, they'll start to rot, though, and buildings will start to sag, as their foundations disappear.
O ....I realy like (love) how you approach the the dutch topics....it makes me smile...thank you!
About the mountain part... You've got to see it through our eyes to understand what we mean. Most of the Netherlands is flat and sure we only have hills. But relative to what we are used to Limburg has some mountains. Which doesn't mean we are not familiar with the mount Everest ;) Try taking the non electric bike out and ride up that vaalserberg and I'm sure you'll see it as a mountain too :)
I was literally chopping up a purple carrot as you were saying you wished they were still
around 😆
I was born in Muiderberg, a town next to the city of Muiden. probably as high as 5ft. Correct me if I'm wrong. then we moved to Hilversum. Part of that was Trompenberg, there again you would never know if you passed it
The wooden poles don't rot, for the water level in the ground is kept high enough and standing in water they won't rot. Also some to know, they drill the hole, then throw in cow hides and such, then put the pole in and that hole filled up with water, only the top needed to be protected by something I forgot, for that was dry.
Awesome video. Thank you very much for your sharing :) I love your videos :)
This channel is so much fun! U do it very well and u deserve much more subscribers. I’m a fan :)
Haha, never knew that what you said about the carrots. Crazy.
It's still very strange for me. . But the line that we honored the Spanish King is even more strange. especially if you are living in Breda where i live.
If you havent been there yet don't forget to visit the 'little switzerland' area in the very south of our tiny country with it's just as tiny range of not mountains. You will probably notice the difference with the rest of the Netherlands. Do a tour below the Maastricht/Valkenburg line and visit country side villages. If you feel confident and exercised enough perhaps even do the tour on bike so you can tell how 1000ft hills can feel like mountains after all :).
I live close to the Wageningse Berg (mountain) in Wageningen and it is a staggering 42 meters high!
To a lot of Dutch people (I guess especially the ones who travel a lot) a hill of 320 m isn't really a mountain either... But that's what you get when your country really is that flat. I've watched a lot of your videos back to back now, and I have to say, I love your content! It's really fun and interesting to see what an expat thinks of our country. I'm glad you feel so positive about our home. We complain a lot (another thing the Dutch like to do), but I really believe that the Netherlands is one of the best places in the world to live. Sure, I'm a little biased, but still. I hope you have a lot of good years to come in our humble little country. And please keep it up with the awesoome content! You present it in a really fun, genuine and casual way and I even learned some new stuff about my on country. How cool is that?!
The wooden poles have a length in meters, or centimeters. Not foot! Foot is not a SI standard.
Not only Amsterdam is built on poles, a large part of the country is. The ground is too soft to build on directly, if you do that it would just sink into the ground. In the past they used wooden poles, so in most of the old parts of city's there are still buildings on wooden poles. But today we use concrete poles, in Dutch they are called heipalen. They are used to transfer the weight to a sand layer somewhere between 5 en 20 meters down
The Dutch national anthem is a battle hymn from the 80 year war, which is right at the origin of the country. The Dutch provinces had been completely autonomous before, but were now under Spanish control. There's a reference to honoring the Spanish king in there because it was the duke ruling here that was so hated, not the Spanish king. It's sung from the perspective of the one organizing our side of the war, who later more or less founded the country and is the ancestor of our royal family. One of the titles he held was related to a region of modern-day France called "Orange", which is where the Dutch association with that color comes from. He was actually from Nassau, which is in modern-day Germany, though. However, the Netherlands had not been founded yet, and the term Diets actually referred to the Germanic area of Europe at the time, which includes both current day Germany and the Netherlands. That word is the origin of "Deutsch", "Deutschland", "Dutch" and that part of the national anthem.
Related to the reclamed land: At Neeltje Jans (part of the Delta works) the side of the building says "Hier gaan over het tij de maan, de wind en wij" meaning "over here the tide is ruled by the moon, the wind and us"
Hé, don’t mess with our king ;-). We are proud of our monarchy (well at least most of us) though it’s mostly ceremonial. And we do get a day off, wear our orange hats and shirts again and get wasted at 3 pm....
Are you really proud of a monarchy? I don't get that.
@@randysem Do you live in a REPUBLIC?, Republics have also their ups & downs, get over it!
We also sing: 'the king of Spain, I have always honored' in our national anthem.
Carrots can be white, yellow, orange, purple or blackish, or combinations of these colors. A minute detail which is overlooked is the Netherlands control a very large part of seed development and crossbreeding techniques to improve both the productivity as the resistance against pests and diseases of an enormous amount of crops... This also includes GMO and single use hybrids, but understand crossbreeding is genetic modification ( only through trial and error) as well. Humans have tried to select the strongest plants for 1000s of years now, so this isn't a new development as such. Orange carrots were a gift to the Dutch monarchy by Dutch seed growers, and the fact most people do not know there are other color products is partly because of good marketing techniques and a superior product.
Houses in Amsterdam are built on marshy land, without poles the houses topple or sink.
The King of The Netherlands is from the house of Orange Nassau which has it's roots traceable to it's creation in 1515, where a German nobleman and a French Noblewoman were wed, and their respective lands of Nassau and Orange were merged.
More info on Wikipedia.
The highest point of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is actually Mount Scenery (883m) on the Island Saba in the Carribean. As Saba is seen as a municipality it's formally part of the Netherlands.
We often refer to the "dijken" as the dutch mountains
I am from german blood is spoken out in the person of William of Orange, our founding father, which was actually a Herman prince ego tot Holland as a present.
The Dutch was a part of the German empire for a few 100years, we were all German in Europe once, the anthem is so old, that song was written ages ago, when that German empire was not as long ago. Great video.,
I live in Assen and we have this really small hill here, you can literally walk up it in less than a minute an we call it the pitteloose berg(pitteloose mountain)
building on poles is something that is still very common.
There was a seabattle going on centuries ago where Schiphol airport is now. Zevenbergen (sevenmountains) is a city below sealevel.
Those poles are driven into the swamp, so, the houses are build "on poles" partly, and partly on mud.. the poles connect the sandy underground and the houses...these days concrete poles...
One of the reasons king Willem-Alexander flies for KLM is to maintain his Air Transport Pilot License. But he can only fly aircraft commercially, with crew and passengers, if he regularly does do such flights and if he's knowledgeable enough about the type of airplane he flies. He used to fly Fokker 70s but the KLM stopped using that type of airplane and he now flies Boeing 737s.
About our national anthem, the original line was "Ben ick van Duytschen bloet" The word Duytsch here means something different than 'German'. It's the name for the language the people of the Eastern and Northeastern low lands spoke that spoke a German accent. There was also Dietsch, which was the name for the German accents in the Southern and Western low lands. At the time the anthem was created, the Netherlands in its current form didn't yet exist as a nation and the Dutch language didn't exist as well. There was more of a spread of local dialects which from region to region sounded very similar but were quite different on both ends. From the low lands towards the Alps where the low lands spoke Diets, Duuts, and eventually, high German. When viewed politically all these lands were part of the holy roman empire. Some, like the Netherlands were held by the king of Spain (one of the major Habsburg branches), others by local lords, Prussia or another major Habsburg branch which was also the king of Austria. It was a patchwork of small nations. The Dutch got fed up with the Spanish Habsburgs and fought a war of independence for which Willem van Nassau was the leader. He is the founding father of the Dutch monarchy, although it took a few generations to get there. His official estate, Nassau, actually does lie in modern day Germany. But the current house of Orange-Nassau (family name of the Dutch monarchy) doesn't hold lands there any more.
Our country on the west/north is sinking in for centuries. It´s a river delta. Therefore it is relatively easy to reclaim land. In Florida it is about the opposite, the sea rises up from under the land.
The _Official_ translation of the first verse of our anthem is as follows:
William of Nassau, scion
Of a Dutch and ancient line,
I dedicate undying
Faith to this land of mine.
A prince I am, undaunted,
Of Orange, ever free,
To the king of Spain I've granted
A lifelong loyalty.
Hi Eva, the 1st verse not only says: “I am of German blood” (true for the house of Orange) but also “I have always honored the king of Spain”. The latter has a nice connection with the1581 "Act of Abjuration" (google it): As this king didn’t serve his subjects well, he “lost” his rights - we declared our independence!
Because of resemblances in the text it is speculated that Thomas Jefferson had a copy of the "Act of Abjuration" when he drafted the American Declaration of Independence.
About the mountain thing: You know how eskimos have a bunch of different words for snow because they have so much snow? Well we have the opposite of that with height differences.
While the word 'mountain' and dutch word 'berg' technically translate to eachother, they don't quite mean the same thing. I typically associate a much larger structure with the word mountain, wherease the word berg doesn't really have to refer to something very large. In some ways 'pile' or 'heap' might be a better translation for 'berg'. For instance I would never call a 1 meter high pile of sand a mountain but in dutch you would call it "een berg zand".
So no, we are not calling vaalserberg a mountain, you are, we call it a berg, which doesn't quite mean the same thing but there is no better translation.
We needed land to grow our tulips 🌷.
Awww!
He is referring to the Haarlemmermeerpolder :) Also a region which used to be water and is drained more than 100 years ago.
I'd like to recommend you, Eva, to visit the Cruquius museum, close to Haarlem. There you can see how they actually drained the whole area, by pumping up more than 300.000 liters (70.000 gallons?) per minute and transporting it into the specially build Ringvaart. Very interesting to see :)
and those tulips originally came from Turkey.. ;-)
Allowing the king to fly, he is a qualified pilot, was a courtesy to the monarch. Passengers were never aware he was in the cockpit.
About the poles; Amsterdam is not as unique in that way as you might think. Lots of cities are in some degree built on poles. It either be because of being built in a swamp, like Amsterdam, or being build around or even on top of at river, like Antwerp. Next to Amsterdam, Venice is of course also entirely built on poles.
We have purple food in NL, including carrots, culliflower (Bloemkool), eggplant (aubergine), cabbage (kool), and beets. Most poles are replaced by concrete nowadays.
About the poles Amsterdam resides on.
This is not only Amsterdam a lot of old cities are build on wooden poles, because it all used to be swampy marshy area
Re: mountains and hills, check out the fun little movie “The Englishman who went up a mountain and came down a hill”.
But basically, above 300m can be called a mountain.
In Amersfoort we have the 'Amersfoortse berg' the mountain of Amersfoort which is about 50 meters high.
It's not just Flevoland but also the haarlemmermeer a former Lake.
Smack down in the middle is schiphol
"Dutch people with nothing to do converted water to land" well that is not really how this originates.
Look at a very old map of the Netherlands. You will see that there were very many inland lakes, especially in Noord- and Zuid-Holland (e.g. around Amsterdam).
These lakes had very shallow borders, more like a beach. Whenever there was a storm, the water would wash over the borders and cause local flooding.
That of course was a nuisance so those were pumped dry and converted to land. You will find many regions with a name ending in "meer" (lake) which originally were lakes.
The Flevoland province is a bit of a different thing, that was really made on purpose to gain land. But that was centuries later.
Like Stefan Peerboom said, back when the Dutch national anthem was written, there was no Germany :) Almost 99,9% of the Dutch people don't give a crap about the whole Dutch anthem, but even more (yes more) don't even know the origin of the line 'ben ik van Duitsen bloed'.
Do you know the reason the king flies for KLM? Its not like.. he has a job... but the royal aircraft was a Boeing 737 (i forgot the new type, it similar though)., and he likes to fly it himself. But in order to keep your type rating, you have a minimum amount of flight hours in that aircraft type you have to do each year. So he flies for the KLM as well on the side just to keep his rating. I remember debates in politics when the KLM was ordering a new aircraft type, and the king supposedly having to been involved in that decision because he wanted to fly a specific type, but then KLM would have to use those as well, so he could keep certified for it :D (haven't seen proof for it though)
Another funny fact: Do you know where the name Holland came from? The name Holland first appeared in sources for the region around Haarlem, and by 1064 was being used as the name of the entire county. By the early twelfth century, the inhabitants of Holland were called Hollandi in a Latin text. Holland is derived from the Old Dutch term holtlant ("wood-land"). Wood land, where are these woods? It is countryside and cows every where!
German is nowadays only used to refer to the German people and the German language. The word Diets and the use of German to refer to the Dutch people and the Dutch language have both become obsolete. However, when one speaks of Diets in the proper sense, this never refers to German, but to (southern) Middle Dutch. Diets never mean modern German, but earlier German could also mean Diets.
"At one time the U.S. Board on Geographic Names defined a mountain as being 1,000 feet (300 m) or taller, (...)"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain
Heh, we have 200 foot hills that carry the word berg (mountain) in their name.As a Dutchman, i consider everything over 15 feet a hill! Technically though, anything over 500 meters high we consider a (small) mountain.
There is even a song with the title "In the Dutch mountains", from the group The Nits !
Another nice fact is that the Dutch invented the first stock market. Also don't agree with the term reclaimed land because it was never land. We just kicked the sea out.
Actually, much of the land we reclaimed was indeed 'land' (peaty marches), but the peat was washed away during a number of devastating floods after 1000. Especially the Allerheiligenvloed in 1170, and 3 more massive floods in the next 50 years.
A pilot has to do a certain amount of flying hours to keep his license and so does our king. That’s why he often is a pilot.
The British royals are from German blood; a lot of European royals are.
Most of the country is flat but just visit the region of Nijmegen or the south of Limburg where it’s different.
About those wooden poles: Without these poles the buildings would be sinking into the soil. The soil is to set ft to carry any buildings. So what th these poles the drilled them down until the found a hard surface. This technology is still used today but the wooden poles have been replaced since the midst of last century bi concrete poles. So the assumption that Amsterdam and other cities are build on wooden poles is incorrect. It is only in the older parts of the city.
Not only our king has a side job, our prime minister has a side job as teacher for one day a week.
and he uses a bicycle instead of a car to travel to work. Still I don't like his polititacals view
Thank God for more than one political party
ua-cam.com/video/jcOyAXT7fKc/v-deo.html
That's our king. We are very blessed that our leaders are so grounded.
First of all Willem-Alexander had this job on the side before he became king. An efficient way to keep your license valid. Before that he flew small bush planes in Africa for a doctors service. As for the monarchy system: a king like the ones on Europe has no actual power, he is a figurehead. A comparison with an executive president like the American one is fully beside the point.
Aah, the wooden poles. I believe they're slowly changing those into concrete or something because the wood rots when it comes into contact with ait.
And that whole anthem gets weirder with: De koning van Hispanje heb ik altijd geeerd. (I've always honoured the king of Spain). At least the Duitschen Bloed references being Germanic (which we still are even if the wording is slightly strange). All the house wars that happened over Europe in the past don't make it make a lot of sense that someone would've always honoured the king of Spain, not even in the time it was written and the person it was written for.
Im an Dutch man with imsomnia and binge- watched all of your 6 longgggggggggggg vids:) and subscribed.. I kinda liked it to watch them... Enjoy your stay in our small and weird country..
Willy flew me to Ibiza once. It's true. I saw him boarding when I was waiting for the gates to open.
I used to live on top of the 'Paasberg' = 'Easter mountain' in Lochem. It is 33 meters high.
The houses in Amsterdam are so crooked because of the way they used to (and still do often) move furniture in and out. All the houses have a hook high up, it's used to lift furniture up and in. Hence the large windows, so furniture can fit through. Due to years and years of lifting furniture, these houses became crooked. Another weird fact
Reclaiming land started way earlier than Flevoland. Schiphol is for example situated in a polder.
And we are not singing of German blood. It’s from duitschen bloed, and why do you think the Dutch are called Dutch? Duitsch is an old-Dutch word for the people in the Netherlands. So the English name comes from the Dutch word Duitsch.
Germany, or Duitsland, didn’t even exist in the time the Wilhelmus was written.
The reason the king flew for KLM is mainly that the official government plane which is also used as the royal private jet (I mean, why not combine the functions, neither use needs it *all* the time) was a Fokker mumblety, and the king - from well before he was king, just crown prince then - enjoys flying his family as pilot. But to do so you need not only a commercial pilot’s license but also a type rating for that Fokker and to maintain that requires flying that plane once every month. He could do that by taking joyrides in the government plane but why the hell not do some regular passenger flights to Manchester or whatever? Then you get paid, instead of having to pay the fuel yourself. It was not a coincidence that the government plane was the same type as the KLM CityHopper fleet (short haul in small planes). KLM also did the maintenance for the government plane while they were doing it for their own fleet. But KLM decided to replace their Fokker fleet (which was aging, and Fokker went completely bankrupt in.... I wanna say the 90s) with Brazilian Embraer jets. The replacement government plane - not finished yet I believe - was also ordered from the same stuff that KLM already uses, but this time they went for a bigger 737 instead of an Embraer. And also I think it’s a secondhand 737 retired form passenger service, but not sure on that one.
I would bet that Alex is working hard on his 737 type rating, by now, unless he’s decided to give up that particular hobby now that he is king and father and has two real jobs that take up most of his time.
Though we are technically a Monarchy (which was imposed on us after the defeat of Napoleon by the British. Napoleon took our country in 1798 and put his brother on the throne of a new Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1806 until he merged it into France proper in 1810 after he found his brother siding more with the Dutch than the interests of France). Before that we were a republic. The British insisted on having a buffer state against the French, so they merged the former Dutch Republic and what is now Belgium into a new country. And as they where a Monarchy themselves, they installed a Monarch as its leader: William I, son of the former stadhouder (an elected leader of the Republic, but commonly from the house of Orange-Nassau). As he was also Grand Duke of Luxembourg, his rule stretched the area now commonly called the BeNeLux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg). Unfortunately for him the parts that form Belgium hadn't been culturally part of The Netherlands since the rebellion against Spain in 1568, and so there was a large resentment in those parts against Dutch rule (mostly due to the influence of the Walloon aristocracy, who spoke French). William I treated them as inferiors, which led them to revolt in 1830, and after 9 years of war he finally accepted their independence. Meanwhile the Parliament decided that having a Monarch with a lot of power was a bad thing, so they slowly but surely started a process to remove power from the Monarch, which led to a redrafting of our constitution in 1848 (needed to remove all references to the Belgian territories anyway) starting the process of moving power from the Monarch to the Parliament. As such the Monarch has mostly a ceremonial role as an Ambassador for our country, but no real actual power.
So it's better to say that we are a Parliamentary Democracy with a Monarch than a Monarchy.
Willem van Oranje (Dillenburg, Germany, April 24, 1533 - Delft, July 10, 1584) is the Dutch father of the fatherland, and the founder of the House of Orange.
This is why im from German blood
'Are we living in the 17th century' is very funny because back in the 17th century the netherlands was one of the few republics in existence
I don't know anyone already mentioned the fact that William of Oranges most used language was French. Learned at the court of Charles the fifth. That is also why his last words were in French.
You are nice about us. Really nice how you like your life here.
Most of the land we reclaimed, or made suitable for building wasn't sea. It was swampland. Hence the poles.
re #3. It will surprise you to learn that oranges also had different colours, yellow, ocre, deep red even. But the orange ones were preferred. I don't know whether the Dutch were involved but in the 17th century we were at war with Spain and the princes leading the liberation revolt were all of the family "Orange", like today. And the 'apples' coming from Spain, Valencia mainly, were called 'apples of Orange". This appealed to patriotic feelings. We would not care for any other 'apples from Spain' than the orange coloured ones, that goes without saying, doesn't it?. Our flag used to be orange-white-blue but today it is red-white-blue, I don't know why.
every 'heap of land' that sticks out more then 200 meter above the landscape around it is defined as 'berg' (mountain), everything below that is technically a hill, I think. And since the vaalserberg is about 322m above sea level, that would make it a berg.
I would like to see what you think about metric vs the mile (etc) system, did it confuse you? which one makes more sense to you?
Tafelberg, only 25 km from Amsterdam, is under 40 meters high. Technically, even we would call that a hill.
We call that a mountain, because we have a lot of hills and we want to make a difference between a larger hill and just a small hill. Especially for people on a bicycle. So that they know what they are up to. We know it's not really a mountain.
In the part 'Ben ik van Duitschen bloed' the word 'Duitschen' doesn't refer to German but to the medieval word 'Diets'.
nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diets
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology_of_the_Low_Countries
To expand on Stefan's comment: It indeed does not mean "German" blood. "Duitsen" is the same word as dutch, Duits en diets, and it means "volk", as in people. Germany is called Deutschland in the German language, which simply means "The land of the people". Diets can also mean the language of the people, which is different from what the monarchs spoke.
In it's meaning of "people", Duits/Deutsch refers to the unity of different states in Germany. One people, united in one country.
Likewise, "ben ik van Duitsen bloed" should be understood as "I genetically belong to this people." So our national anthem is not referring to out neighboring country, but simply has racism as it's first line.
It is funny thing about the national anthem. The first king of the netherlands used to be of german roots. The other line about that we honor the spanish king is also a thing of that time. The netherlands was at that moment a part of spain so that was why we honored him. After we defeated the spanish because we wanted independence we still had a close relation with them, sort of. That is why the anthem stayed the same out of respect an love for the country and history
Willem van Oranje was NEVER a king. He was Prince of Orange, and became Stadhouder (placeholder) for Holland and most other provinces. Stadhouder-ship became a more or less hereditary title (it caused regular conflicts between supporters of the Republic and supporters of the Oranje-Nassau's). Initially, the Dutch provinces sought to get some other nobles interested in becoming king, but most of them messed up, or were not too interested. But Willem van Oranje was just intended to be a temporary leader.
As I am from german blood, I have no problem with that sentence.
I do have problems with the monarchy (the whole idea of the Netherlands was to have a republic).
The national anthem refers to William of Orange, who was of german blood. So it makes sense as such.
The whole idea was not to have a republic, but to get rid of spanish rule. Initially, lordship was offered to Queen Elizabeth I of England (who was an ally) by the dutch nobles, but she refused. This left no other option than to continue without one.
Btw, imagine Queen Elizabeth I accepting..
Ik ben van Duitse bloed klopt omdat willem van oranje duits was en hij heeft het geschreven. Ze hebben ook nog een groot stuk land in Frankrijk (orange) vandaar de naam oranje 😁
Study the Athem a bit more carefully. The Royal family has historic links to Germany and France. (French County of Orange is where our national colour came from, and the melody is of an old French military marching song)
That highest Dutch mountain is even shared with Germany and Belgium
the Dutch engineers worked in New Orleans when their land was drowning and also in new york not so long ago for the same reason, these engineers are for hire for Florida but the rather wait till the damage is done
We were part of Germania, all sorts of different ''tribes'', with land ranging from England up to Scandinavia etc etc, and i personally cannot be proud of it (why would i ?) it's just a fact, but i'm glad we do.
The national anthem. In the medieval age Germany and The Netherlands were together. So everybody in that area was Dutch. In English language Dutch remained and is connected to the Netherlands and in other languages Dutch (Deutsch) remained and is connected to Germany. International European borders changed all the time. When the anthem was written the King of Spain ruled in The Netherlands. And since this anthem is extremely old these versus are in there.
The 'German' part in our natiional anthem does not relate to Germany. It is 'Diets' in the song, which is an old word for 'people'. It has been an enthonym for many Germanic peoples in the past.
As for the Vaalserberg, it is the highest in the Netherlands and we have to share it with two other countries.
Not anymore :) Mount Scenery on Saba is now officialy the highest point in the Netherlands at 887 meters.