Holy Thursday/Maundy Thursday and in Dutch Witte Donderdag, literally White Thursday. And we did have snow flurries. The temperature has not yet risen above freezing for the last three weeks. Europe is still in a perma frost. Our 40 plus choir sang for about a 100 parishioners for the Holy Thursday service. It went well. Beautiful music. We used the Missa in Honorem San Ambrosii from Jan Nieland. Easter Sunday morning we will sing from Lloyd Webber’s mass “The Prince of Peace” and a number of other works and conclude with the Hallejah chorus from the Messiah.
I met two of my van den Berg Cousins, Karel and Bert, at the Amsterdam Archives. We have the same great-grandmother. I had never yet been in the building. It was built in the early 20th century as the headquarters for the Dutch Trading Company, the successor of the old Dutch East Indies Company. The below pictures were taken in the basement which used to be the bank’s vault. The entire 20th century accounting and business correspondence records of the “Mastmaker” S.J. de Vries are archived in this building. The older records are archived at the Frisian Maritime Museum in Sneek.
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- Working with mirrors. The Amsterdam coat of arms.
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- The basement of the Amsterdam Archives
