Leisure Activities
He is an aircraft pilot and sportsman. In 1989, the Prince flew as a volunteer for the African Medical Research and Education Foundation (AMREF) in Kenya, and in 1991 he spent a month flying for the Kenya Wildlife Service. To make sure he flies enough hours a year to retain his license, he also regularly flies the Dutch royal airplane when he and his family travel abroad.
Using the name "W.A. van Buren", one of the less well-known titles of the House of Orange-Nassau, he has participated in the New York City Marathon, where his aunt, Princess Christina, and several cousins live. In the Netherlands, he was a participant in the Frisian Eleven Cities ice skating marathon, aka the Elfstedentocht.
The Prince was seen cheering on the Netherlands' national football team during their hosting year, at Euro 2000, always wearing an orange vest. He memorably gave a nervous laugh of disbelief as the Netherlands missed their second penalty of normal time against the Italians in the semi-final.
Prince Willem-Alexander and his wife travelled to South Africa to support the national team during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and were shown on worldwide television wearing orange clothing.
Read more about this topic: Willem-Alexander, Prince Of Orange
Famous quotes containing the words leisure and/or activities:
“The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure fruitful.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)