John Scarffe, Nederland. Consul General Gerbert Kunst visited the Nederland, Colorado Town Hall on April 24, 2019, as part of his visit to Colorado for a Pop-Up Consulate and gave an appropriate gift to Mayor Kristopher Larsen. Nederland is named after the Mining Company Nederland in 1873.

Mayor Kristopher Larsen said this was the second major delegation from a foreign country while his has been in office. The first was from Uzbekistan.
Kunst and his entourage of five advisors presented a new Nederland sign to the town, and Larsen presented Kunst with the history books “Cloudland” and “Around Nederland.” Kunst thanked the town for having them and said it was home, to be honest.

Larsen said the books would explain the history between the town and country, and he is looking forward to building better relationships between Nederland and the Netherlands.

Kunst said he will pop up public diplomacy between Colorado and Netherlands. Colorado has 100,000 people of descent from the Netherlands. Kunst and company also were in the area to bring an exhibit of the Netherlands story of Anne Frank to Denver.

The Anne Frank exhibit is a peer-to-peer program, in which students learn the story and then are encouraged to pass that on to their friends. Kunst said it’s important to share their story in Denver. Netherlands has an honorary counsel in Denver who contacted area schools to get students involved, and the opening was April 24 at 5:30 p.m.

The delegation has also been visiting businesses in the Denver area. All of the consul’s entourage lives in San Francisco and travels to the Netherlands once per year. They contact U.S. businesses to strengthen relationships and renew passports.

In Nederland, the group visited Town Hall, the Mining Museum and the Visitor’s Center.

They discussed the possibility of a sister city relationship with a town in the Netherlands, and suggestions included Valkenburg, a mining town in the Netherlands, and the Town of America.

For lunch, they went to the Branding Iron, where Heather Hatwan prepared special “Bar Bouncer” sandwiches, popular in the Netherlands and made with wheat bread, ham, eggs and Gouda cheese. Following lunch, the group returned to Denver for the Anne Frank exhibit opening.

(Originally published in the May 2, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)