Word: amsterdam
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Full Bathtubs. Seldom had placid Amsterdam appeared so festive. Orange banners flew from every peaked rooftop and festooned the walls of theaters and office buildings. Orange ties and orange ribbons decked every citizen, and orange lights glittered along every road. When the sun broke through chill August clouds the Dutch said: "Het oranje zonnetje komt altijd door" (The little orange sun always comes through). As the city's population swelled from a normal 800,000 to twice that number, hotelkeepers flung mattresses in bathtubs and police considered putting deck chairs on hundreds of boats. By day and by night...
From the moment (11:33 a.m., Saturday, Sept. 4) when Wilhelmina dotted the second i of her bold signature at the solemn abdication ceremony in Amsterdam's Royal Palace, The Netherlands' Queen was her auburn-haired, 39-year-old daughter Juliana. By her own choice, Wilhelmina had become merely a dowager Princess of The Netherlands...
...assume her mother's birthday. In fact, she began her reign with an act of independence. Wilhelmina's daughter would have none of the orange marigolds which bloom everywhere in floral tribute to the House of Orange. For her formal inauguration, Queen Juliana ordered Amsterdam's Nieuwe Kerk banked instead with pink begonias...
...Amsterdam's great white-plastered Wester Kerk the light is religious but not dim. Through its many plain-glass windows floods a clear, Vermeer-like light. Last week, at the closing service of the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches, this revealing light showed every detail: ruff-collared Scandinavians; bearded, black-veiled Orthodox dignitaries; purple-cassocked Old Catholics; saffron-stoled representatives of the Church of South India; U.S. pastors in business suits and glittering spectacles. For the past fortnight, delegates from 147 churches in 44 countries-every major branch of Christianity except Roman Catholicism and the Russian...
...watching Protestant world had hoped, in its dim and sentimental way, for something better. It had perhaps even hoped for another Pentecost. At Pentecost, there were tongues of fire from heaven, and human beings like ready lamps, waiting to be lit. At Amsterdam, there were committees, agenda, resolutions, debates, and trilingual earphones. The men of Amsterdam did not expect and did not receive flames from heaven. They had not met to be inspired but to "get something done." They were moved, not by tongues of fire, but by reasonable anxiety, cautious good will, Protestant practicality...