Last night Queen Beatrix attended the opening of the annual Holland Dance festival at the Lucent Dance Theater in The Hague. The queen was accompanied by the prince of Orange, princess Máxima, prince Constantijn and Princess Laurentien. Princess Máxima wore the grey Natan dress that she first wore during Prinsjesdag in 2004 while princess Laurentien looked smashing in a green creation.
Click on image to see photo at PPE
Click on image to see photo at PPE
It is widely known that queen Beatrix is fond of any form of dance, as is her sister Margriet. The younger generation as also hooked, the daughters of the crown prince attend ballet classes and recently princess Máxima took her daughters to a (private) rehearsal of the National ballet in Amsterdam.
During the festival, the 50th annversairy of the Holland Dans Theater will be celebrated. During this 12th edition of the dance festival over 70 performances and 100 workshops will be given. The festival will end on November 15th with a parade of 1200 amateur dancers.
More information about the festival can be found here.
Marengo Dutch Royals Prince Constantijn, Prince of Orange, Prince Willem-Alexander, Princess Laurentien, Princess Máxima, Queen Beatrix, Royal Ballet
Click on image to see photo at refdag.nl
A job as lackey for queen Beatrix at the palace seems very popular. Since the ’service of the royal house’ placed a job advertisement on the internet last week, the service has been flooded with applications.
‘We often place advertisements on the internet’, says spokesperson Weijermans in the Algemeen Dagblad, ‘but this time we are getting an enormous amount of reactions’. The adversisement says that women can also apply for the job. According to Weijermans it is a misunderstanding that only men can be lackey’s, though at the moment no women are employed in this function.
Candidates can reply until November 1st. Among other things, they need to be fluent in English and have knowledge about polishing silverware. The exact requirements can be read in Dutch here. The job takes 36 hours a week, for which you will be payed 2338,64 euros a month.
Marengo Dutch Royals Queen Beatrix, Royal Household, Royal Staff
Click on image to see hpoto at haagsallerlei.nl
Princesses Máxima and Laurentien of The Netherlands had several public engagements during the last two days. On Tuesday night princess Máxima visited the new Culturalis Theater in the Schilderswijk in The Hague.
The Culturalis is an amateur theater for young people. The princess arrived at the theater on the Hobbema street at 8PM and left two hours later. She opened the theater by hitting on an Indonesian gong. For the occassion the princess wore a pink dress from Natan that she recently also wore during her visit to New York.
Yesterday princess Máxima visited two projects of the Orange Fund. She visited the foundation Ster and the foundation Two Get There. both of them are active to help vulnerabe children in The Netherlands. Ster organises holidays for insecure children from 8 to 13. Two Get There stimulatues langiage development of children. Both foundations are supported by the Orange Fund, of which princess Máxima is the patron.
Click on image to see photo at PPE
While Máxima visited these projects, princess Laurentien was in Rotterdam to launch her childrens book ‘Mr Finney en de wereld op zijn kop‘ (Mr. Finney and the world upside down). The book has been illustrated by Sieb Posthuma and together they presented the book to the press. The princess was accompanied by her husband, prince Constantijn. Princess Irene of The Netherlands, sister of queen Beatrix, also attended the presentation.
More about the book at: www.mrfinney.nl
Marengo Dutch Royals Prince Constantijn, Princess Irene of the Netherlands, Princess Laurentien, Princess Máxima, The Orange Fund
On Monday, Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands attended a meeting of the ‘club of Rome’ in Amsterdam. Former president of the USSR, Michael Gorbatsjov, also attended the meeting, as he is a honorairy member of the club.
Click on image to see picture at PPE
The club of Rome is an association that was founded in the late 60-ties by European scientists who were worried about the state of the world. During the Global Assembly, a two day conference of the club that was held in the music building near the IJ river (Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ) was the last in a series of seven meetings that had to prepare the climate summit in Copenhagen, later this year. The theme of the conference was climate, energy and economic recuperation.
After the conference the queen took her time to talk with former president Gorbatsjov, as can be seen in this clip from the local television station AT5. Apart from the scientists and politicians, the conference was also attended by prince Carlos of Bourbon-Parma, a nephew of Queen Beatrix. The prince recently announced his engagement to Annemarie Gualthérie van Weezel.
Click here to go to the website of the club of Rome. And click here for the current events thread of Queen Beatrix.
Marengo Dutch Royals, Italian Royals Bourbon-Parma, Environment, Mikhail Gorbachev, Prince Carlos, Queen Beatrix, USSR
HH Princess Anita of Orange-Nassau, the wife of HH Prince Pieter-Christiaan, today celebrates her fortieth birthday.
View the image at Koninklijkhuis
Princess Anita was born Anita Theodora van Eijk on October 27th, 1969, to Leonardus Antonius and J.C.M. van Eijk. Anita was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland and has an older sister and brother (her brother passed away when Anita was 16 years of age).
From her birth, Anita was a ‘citizen of the world’. She spent her early childhood in Aix-en-Provence, France before the family headed back to the Netherlands where Anita undertook her primary school education. With three countries already under her belt, the future Princess then moved to Singapore where she attended high school at the United World College of South East Asia. It was then back to the Netherlands, and Anita completed an International Baccalaureate from the Rhineland Lyceum. Read more…
JessRulz Dutch Royals Biography, Birthday, Princess Anita
The image of the much troubled building project of the holiday house of the prince of Orange and his wife in Mozambique will be dealt with by professionals. In The Netherlands there has been a lot of commotion about the project on the Machangulo peninsula in Mozambique. There were various claims of corruption, embazzlement, intimidation and violance against locals which already caused the prince to start a foundation that deals with the project.
Click on image to see picture at www.eo.nl
After the criticism of the last weeks the project it has been decided that apart from the Government Information Service (RVD), three other spokesmen will be involved with the information about the project from now on. As newspaper ‘Telegraaf‘ reports, the communications advisor Frans van der Grint of the renowed PR agency Hill & Knowlton, has been appointed as spokesman for the Machangulo Trust Office. The Trust office was created this summer to represent the business interests of the Prince in the Machangulo project. “Given the great interest and the many questions from the media, the Machangulo Trust Office thought it was wise to appoint a new communications adviser” commented Van der Grint.
Apart from the foundation, the building project also hired a PR agent for the project in Mozambique. They are busy in hiring another one in The Netherlands too. The Dutch PR agent will be dealing with the Dutch press. The RVD emphasizes that they will be the only ones talking on behalf of the prince of Orange and his wife.
In the mean time, political magazine HP/De Tijd immidiately criticized the choice for the PR firm Hill & Knowlton. In an article in their online edition they list some remarkable earlier assignments of the firm. In 1954 they placed an advertisement in 400 US newspapers, claiming that smoking is not lethal. The article also lists other examples.
The discussion about the holiday house of the prince and princess has been dragging on since July 2008. The public debate in The Netherlands has turned against the project and one negative article after another appears in the Dutch press. It remains to be seen if these spokesmen can change the present mood among the public and the press.
More about the Machangulo project in this thread at the Dutch forum at TRF.
Marengo Dutch Royals Mozambique, Prince of Orange, Prince Willem-Alexander, Princess Máxima, Residences
Click on image to see picture at telegraaf.nl
Newspaper the ‘Telegraaf‘ reports that Prince Bernhard of Orange-Nassau, 2nd son of Princess Margriet of The Netherlands, has been punished on sunday by the directors of the final races at the circuit of Zandvoort. The prince was suspended for the final race of the Tango Dutch GT4 Championship, in which he would participate together with Danny van Dongen in a Corvette C6.
The reason for this was an incident at the Dielcup, of saturday. When the prince came close to a curve, his car bumped the car of Liesette Braams, who ended next to the circuit, together with two other cars. The prince was shown the black flag and he was not allowed to participate in sunday’s race.
It isn’t the first time this season that this happened. The prince was not invited to the Dutch GT4-race in belgium because he didn’t behave correctly, in front of the eyes of the people who were in charge of the race.
Marengo Dutch Royals Horse Racing, Prince Bernhard van Vollenhoven
To commemorate HRH Prince Constantijn’s fortieth birthday, celebrated tomorrow October 11th, the Royal House released a series of new portraits of the Prince and his family.
Click to see the image at Koninklijkhuis
The series features the Prince and his wife, HRH Princess Laurentien, and the couple’s three children: TE Countess Eloise, Count Claus-Casimir and Countess Leonore. There are also two individual portraits of the Prince, and in several of the images the facial similarites between Constantijn and his father, the late Prince Claus, is clear.
HRH Prince Constantijn Christof Frederik Aschwin of the Netherlands, Prince of Orange-Nassau, Jonkheer van Amsberg was born on October 11th, 1969, in Utrecht; the youngest son of the then HRH Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands and her husband HRH Prince Claus. Read more…
JessRulz Dutch Royals Biography, Birthday, Portraits, Prince Constantijn
The RVD yesterday confirmed that HRH Princess Ariane, the youngest daughter of TRH The Prince of Orange and Princess Máxima, was admitted to hospital yesterday with respiratory problems resulting from an infection to her upper breathing system.
In the press release, the RVD stated that Princess Máxima spent the night at the hospital with her daughter, and that the two-year-old will be released Friday morning, Dutch time.
This is not the first time Princess Ariane has been admited to hospital because of breathing issues. In May 2007, a month after her birth, Ariane was taken to the Leiden University Medical Centre with what was believed to be a lung infection. She spent four days in the medical centre and was treated for a bacterial and viral infection.
Princess Máxima in the meantime has cancelled her attendance at this morning’s opening of the “The Qi of China” exhibition at the Amsterdam Tropical Museum.
Click here to remain updated on Princess Ariane’s condition.
JessRulz Dutch Royals Hospital, Princess Ariane, Princess Máxima
Prince Carlos of Bourbon-Parma, the eldest son of the Duke of Parma and Princess Irene of The Netherlands, will get married. The family announced today that the prince will marry Annemarie Gualthérie van Weezel next year.
Click on image to see picture at PPE
Prince Carlos Javier Bernardo of Bourbon-Parma, Prince of Piacenza, was born in Nijmegen on 27 January 1970. He studied Economy, History and Political Sciences at the Wesleyan University in Connecticut and Demographics and Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. At the moment he is the director of a foundation for Innovation and Sustainability.
His fiancée, Annemarie Cecilia Gualthérie van Weezel, was born in The Hague on 18 December 1977. She has an older brother and a younger sister. Annemarie went to secundairy school in Strasbourg (France) and studied Law at the University of Utrecht. After this she studied Radio- and Television journalism at the University of Groningen. At the moment she works for the NOS (the public channel) as a parlamentary journalist in The Hague and Brussels.
Annemarie is the daughter of Hans Gualthérie van Weezel and Ank de Visser. Her father was a member of parliament for the Christian Democratic party. Later he was a member of the European Council in Strasborug, after which he became the Dutch ambassador in Luxembourg. Annemarie’s paternal grandfather is Jan Hans Gualthérie van Weezel, who was the head of the police in The Hague. During the second World War he was a member of the Dutch resistance and the commander of the resistance in Velzen. He was married to Constance Eveline Crommelin, whose family belongs to the Dutch patriciate with links to the nobility.
A link to Annemarie’s anscestors can be found here. Read more about the engagement in this thread.
Marengo Dutch Royals, Italian Royals Annemarie Gualthérie van Weezel, Bourbon-Parma, Engagement, Prince Carlos
