Amy Meng, Reporter
@amengcourant
On January 21st of this year, ten members of the high school’s Model UN Club, including myself, as well as two of our club advisors, Paul Phillips and Allison Freeman, found ourselves standing in the middle of a bustling airport, filled with the sounds of rolling suitcases, hurrying passengers, and shops filled with fresh tulips and wooden clog keychains. This marked the start of our eight-day-long adventure in the Netherlands, an unforgettable and once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Every last week of January, aside from the last two years, the Hague International Model UN hosts its annual Model UN conference for high schoolers in the Hague’s World Forum. With more than 3,000 students from over 100 countries, this conference is one of the largest and more anticipated Model UN events in the world. The conference “is a four-day simulation of the Model UN nations”, as stated on the organization’s official website. With four more days to spare, our club explored the many wonders of the Dutch world. Although the conference was held in the Hague, we also went to Amsterdam and Delft. Inside our different general assembly rooms, with more than a hundred students each, we made friends with students who lived thousands of miles away while discussing pressing world issues concerning this year’s THIMUN theme, “The Future of Borders”. Outside the conference, I got to bond with the nine other Model UN Club members, from planning out what foods the seniors and I were going to order next at a Japanese all-you-can-eat restaurant to discovering a human-sized Lego windmill in the nearby Lego store.
We could all hardly keep our eyes open after the arduous eight-hour flight and on top of that, the six-hour ahead time zone, but we battled through the bouts of eye-closing and moody drowsiness. We expected a cloudy day with hourly drizzles but were pleasantly surprised by the pure blue sky and calming sunshine, although it was very chilly. The busy streets were not only filled with cars but trams and bicycles as well. The Netherlands’ tram system is extremely convenient and easy to access, with stations along all streets, depending on which tram we were to go on. With a scan of the public transportation card, the passenger would be all set for the ride.
The streets were also lined with classic Dutch Baroque architecture. The buildings of pearl whites, sand yellows, and oak browns were decorated with intricate columns and arches. It was especially interesting to see the un-curtained windows of Dutch homes that exposed one’s interiors for bypassers to see, which supported the Dutch values of honesty and trust.
Our sunny but chilly Saturday afternoon was spent in the Mauritshuis Art Museum, home to many famous Dutch paintings, including the renowned “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulip.” All paintings were exquisitely done, and I took fondly to several floral paintings of various colors.
Sunday, January 22nd, was our adventure in Delft, a day filled with shopping, eating, bonding, and exploring the Escher in the Palace museum. All ten of us stood excitedly in the middle of Delft Market Square, in between the Delft City Hall and the tall Nieuwe Kerk protestant church. We stopped by a coffee shop for some coffee, but my ‘favorite seniors’ and I were more interested in bubble tea, so we were given permission to explore the entirety of the market and we parted ways with the other club members. The bubble tea shop wouldn’t open until an hour after, so we spent our time in other shops, including a Dutch porcelain shop, a chocolate shop that satisfied our sugar cravings, and a colorful two-floor toy store.
In the afternoon, our club visited Escher in the Palace, an art museum dedicated to world-renowned Dutch lithographic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher. As a contemporary artist, Escher’s art follows realism but comes with an optical twist that makes his works look impossible. I particularly enjoyed how Escher used uncommon angles to exaggerate certain points of what he was drawing, as present in many of his artworks, such as his famous “Ascending and Descending” and his “Tower of Babel”. Escher’s “Parodied” is another well-known work that may appear normal at first glance, but is a combination of staircases at impossible angles, creating an intriguing illusion. It was also particularly interesting to see how Escher incorporated fish and birds into so many of his patterned works.
Monday, January 23rd, marked the start of the four-day-long Model UN conference in The Hague. There were nearly 180 students in my general assembly committee alone, with four high-trained high schoolers leading the entire room. Model UN committee procedure in Europe is quite different from the procedures present at American colleges Model UN conferences, but everyone was well-behaved and focused on discussing the issues at hand. I was exposed to students of numerous cultures, many of whom have lived in multiple countries.
The conference typically lasted from 10 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon, after which we returned to our hotels to get ready for dinner. We explored dinner options in restaurants of different cultures. While we did go to a classic Dutch restaurant, we also enjoyed Italian, Belgian, Indian, and Japanese cuisine. My favorite restaurant experience was the dinner at an all-you-can-eat Japanese restaurant, in which each table of three or four could order five small dishes every eight minutes. Sitting with two other club members, we soon realized that if we wanted to get our money’s worth of 35 euros per person, we would have to develop an algorithm to order food before our two hours were up. In total, we successfully got through seven rounds, while the other club members stared at us in shock. In case anyone goes to the Hague in the future, the restaurant’s name is “Shabu Shabu Den Haag”.
We spent the last two days, Friday and Saturday, in Amsterdam. The world-famous Dutch fries with mayonnaise did not disappoint. Later in the afternoon, we toured the Anne Frank House, which had been turned into a museum, learning more about Anne Frank’s life inside the house she had lived in during World War II.
Amsterdam’s evening scenery was gorgeous, with office buildings and historic architecture lit up with bright white and yellow lights.
On our very last day in the Netherlands, we went to Museumplein, a square and city park in southern Amsterdam. The park was filled with energetic people, with small souvenirs and food shops to the side, and even an ice skating rink. Museumplein is home to the famous Van Gogh Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Moco Museum, Rijksmuseum, and the Royal Concertgebouw, and we visited the last two attractions. The Rijksmuseum holds the largest Rembrandt collection in the world, with 22 paintings. Among these paintings includes the huge Night Watch, which is the museum’s best-known work. With over 80 rooms, the museum also houses Chinese and Japanese porcelain, numerous forms of sculpture, and the Rijksmuseum Research Library, with a reading room and study room.
On Saturday afternoon, our club enjoyed a two-hour-long symphony concert in the Royal Concert Hall. One of the Model UN captains, who is a huge classical music enthusiast, recommended that we sit behind the symphony orchestra, which provided me with a new musical performance. The concert hall was gorgeous, with elegant chandeliers, soft red seats, and walls engraved with the many names of famous musical composers.
Our club departed the Netherlands the following day, in which everyone sighed with heavy hearts, refusing to believe that our fun-filled adventure had finally ended. The trip to the Netherlands exposed me to a different culture and daily life. Not only was my experience at THIMUN educational through engaging in fruitful discussions and speeches, I also made a few friends along the way, both in my committee and among the club members.
