The Trees of Veenkade

It's been more than a year since we left The Hague: 15 months, in fact.  Since then, we've driven across the United States, settled into Portland, and gotten married - which explains my blog silence for most of 2012 (at some point, I will re-post my Oregon travelogues from the wedding website).  That was followed by two honeymoons to Hawaii and Japan {{awkward throat-clearing and modest blushing at excessive travel indulgence}}.  And then I applied for a job that will take us back to Boston next summer.  Never a dull moment.

In the meantime, in a fit of nostalgia about the Netherlands, I have compiled a year's worth of pictures of the trees that lined our canal in the Hague.  (Veenkade translates loosely to "peat wharf.")  It's the equivalent of posting baby pictures: these mean a lot to me and Jeff, and there's a slight chance that you will find them moderately interesting as well.

At our arrival in October 2010

During the snow storms of December 2010

Midnight on New Year's Eve

January 2011

Biking to work in June 2011

Canal construction in August 2011

September 2011: Instant nostalgia as we leave Veenkade.

Our Hague

Now this makes me nostalgic: a map I started while we were still living in the Hague of all our favorite Haagsche places. It's pretty awesome! I just hope some of these cafes are still in business, nine months later...

View Our Hague in a larger map

Top 10 Den Haag Experiences

For a friend's visit earlier this summer, I compiled a list of our favorite Den Haag experiences.  As we leave The Hague for more American pastures, it seems a fitting adieu to our year of going Dutch*:

1. Classic tourism, Hague-style

By which I mean, an hour in the Mauritshuis (The Hague's world-class museum), followed by a walk around the Binnenhof (the Dutch parliament buildings).

The Binnenhof. Photo Credit: Lyza D. Gardner

2. An afternoon in Delft 

Take the tram, or better yet, ride a bike down to Delft, a condensed version of all that is charming about Dutch towns: canals with narrow streets and white-railed bridges, churches with tilting towers, big squares and little squares and a thriving market on Saturdays. If the weather's nice, have a beer in the Beestenmarkt, a smaller square lined with cafes and full of Dutch people hanging out under leafy trees. No matter what, have a meal at Rossio - our most favorite restaurant in all of the Netherlands.

Beer on the Beestenmarkt

3. Scheveningen in the summer

Dozens of these temporary cafes line the beach during summer.

 The  Hague's beach along the North Sea, Scheveningen is a surprisingly popular destination for German tourists, who like to dig holes in the sand.  (Not only is this in fact a stereotype that Dutch people harbor against Germans, it also appears, based on our limited observations, to be true.) The most fun aspect of the beach scene - even more fun than watching Germans dig holes - is the seasonal bars and cafes that pop up along the sand during the summer months.  These are neither permanent structures nor make-shift encampments, but full-on restaurants with stylish outdoor lounge seating that magically appear sometime in May and then magically disappear - entirely - sometime in September.  You have to see it to believe it.

Feeling peaceful yet?

4. A tour of the Peace Palace

Andrew Carnegie's gift to the world, the Vredespalais is stunning on the outside and full of equally stunning treasures on the inside, presents from grateful countries around the world. The Palace is the seat of the UN's court, the International Court of Justice, which peacefully resolves border disputes, fishery fights, and other heated arguments between countries.  We take it for granted these days, but it if weren't for the ICJ, countries would still be going to war every year over the shifting courses of river boundaries and over-depletion of cod stocks.  Unfortunately, the Peace Palace is largely closed to the public, but if you plan in advance (or know someone who knows someone), you can schedule a tour.

5. Biking in the Wassenaar dunes

This activity combines two ultimate Dutch experiences: bikes and the sea.  An awesome bike path leads north from Scheveningen; at the top of the tallest dunes, you can look back at The Hague in the hazy distance.

(Already missing our Dutch bikes...)

6. Coffee at Zebedeus and/or ice cream at Florencia 

Florencia is an institution in The Hague, serving cheap coffee and cheaper ice cream to pensioners, motorcycle gangs, children, and everyone in between for something like 40 years.  It has the interior decoration of a smoke-filled Italian cafeteria from the 1980s, but any aesthetic doubts are quickly soothed by the 70-cent icecream cones. Based on a significant sample set ;-), I can strongly recommend the caneel (cinnamon), gember (ginger) and stroopwafel.  

Hanging out like Dutch pensioners at Florencia. 
Photo Credit: Lyza D. Gardner

As for their coffee, you're much better off going down the street to Zebedeus, which serves - we have officially concluded - the best coffee in town. Plus it's built into the side of The Hague's Grote Kerk (literally, "Big Church"), which is kind of cool. Zebedeus also has very good food - indeed, it's my favorite restaurant in The Hague.

7. Beer in the Grote Markt 

Particularly recommended for a sunny afternoon, when the square is packed with people sunning themselves.  We are particularly fond of De Zwarte Ruiter, which has an atmospheric interior for those colder, darker days of winter.

At the height of summer, the tables are twice as thick. 
Photo Credit: Lyza D. Gardner

8. An off-beat museum

If you've made it this far down the list, it's probably time for some more cultural amusements. Among The Hague's more unusual museums, I particularly like the Panorama Mesdag and the Museum Meermanno (a.k.a., the Museum of the Book). (I've previously described both here.) 

9. Shopping at the Turkish Market 

A massive open-air market that runs Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, De Haagse Markt (it's actual name) is what we call "a slice of life."  (See also my brief description here.)

10. Lunch or dinner at Simonis

Hit up the main branch of this local institution, amongst the unromantic docks of the Scheveningen port, for the freshest seafood in a no-frills setting and at surprisingly reasonable prices.  (The Dutch like a good value.)  In fact, their raw herring is so good, I had to revise my initial opinion of that ultimate Dutch delicacy.

Photo Credit: Lyza D. Gardner

 * Yes, Dutch couples really do split the bill on dates.

Looking for more Hague ideas? Check out my map of all our favorite places: Our Hague.

When Public Art Goes Bad

Every morning, as I bike through the center of Den Haag on my way to work, I think to myself: "WTF?!?"

Straight from Castle Grayskull

Before I go any further, I should clarify that I really like public art. I think it's important.  I think it's cool.  I come, after all, from a city where the (then-future) mayor famously exposed himself to it. Yay public art.

But The Hague has some seriously bad public art.  In fact, it's so bad that I've grown oddly attached to some of it.  I've posted some of my "favorites" after the jump.

As you'll see, Jeff has aptly named two of them (be forewarned, juvenile bathroom humor ensues).  But the other two (and the homage to Skeletor on the right) still lack names - suggestions are always welcome.

The Long Arm of Justice

Having lived in Boston for eight years, I was appropriately titillated by the recent capture of Whitey Bulger.  But I was even more titillated by the capture, the week before, of Ratko Mladic, alleged mastermind of much mayhem in the Balkans in the 1990s.  Consider: Whitey was wanted for 19 murders; Ratko was wanted for more than 7,000 murders in Srebrenica alone.  Damn.

In fact, there's been so many headlines like these in recent weeks that even I have overlooked some of them.  In the spirit of Jeff's recent post about The Hague's lack of brand clarity, and for your use during cocktail parties and high-end water cooler debates, I present a cheat sheet on the international criminal courts in The Hague - and which recent headlines go with which:

Portland or Den Haag?

In recent months, Jeff has made no secret of his growing love affair with The Hague - a sentiment, it should be noted, that is so unusual amongst the expat set that it draws suspicion bordering on outright hostility.  This state of affairs has led me to adopt a line of argument that can be roughly paraphrased as "Portland-is-just-like-The-Hague-only-not-in-Europe."

There is actually quite a bit of truth to this argument.  Both are gray-weather cities full of white people who like to think they are more liberal than they actually are, where bicyclists have privileged status and pot smoking is (more or less) tolerated.  In the spirit of my Dutch vs. Danish musings (albeit without the fun alliteration), I present Round 2: Portland or Den Haag?

Postcard: The Dunes of Wassenaar

Around Easter, Jeff and I rode our bicycles north out of town, through the dunes bordering the North Sea. The bike path winds around and up and down hills of sand, much more tiring than our everyday flat city biking. At the tops of the tallest dunes, we would pause to look around, but all we could see was sand, pale brush, tall buildings in the hazy distance, and perhaps a thin blue slit where we knew the sea should be. Pausing early on, we saw these sand-colored ponies - perhaps wild? - grazing among the reeds of an inland dune lake.

The Little Green Bike That Could

I did it, I did it, I did it! I rode my bike to work today!!

Lest you think this is no big deal, I wish to remind you of my lack of adult bike-riding skills. I might also point out that this undertaking involved a total of 10 miles of biking in work attire in winds topping 25 mph (and it was uphill both ways - er...)

So yay for having quests, and for persevering.

Best. Day. Ever.

My blogging silence over the last month has been due solely to a large project at work that - thanks be to heaven - we successfully completed last week (World problems: solved! International criminality: vanquished!). Over the next couple of weeks, I will publish belatedly a batch of blog entries I drafted during February but never had a chance to post. Expect to be amazed! (or at least, I hope, entertained...)

But first I thought I'd share, as a one-day snapshot of my life in the Hague, how I celebrated the completion of this monster project: My Best-Day-Ever, Dutch style.

• 6:30: Wake up. Decide to go back to sleep.
• 7:30: Creative writing, with coffee and breakfast made by Jeff (with love!).
• 8:00: Yoga with my youtube guru, Esther Ekart.
• 8:30: Pick out my favorite dress to wear to work (it has glitter and ruffles! Even boys compliment it!)
• 9:30: Leave the house an hour later than normal but with no sense of guilt or compunction. Pause while transiting through Central Station for a koffie verkeerd (cafe au lait) and a hot danish. Decide to take the bus instead of the tram the rest of the way to work - less efficient, but more scenic.
• 10:30: Spend the first hour at work chatting socially with assorted colleagues.
• 12:15: Go to Step (aerobics) class at the in-house gym.
• 2:30: After a late lunch, embark on a cathartic cleaning of my office. Shred massive amounts of paper. Amaze colleagues with the ability to actually see the surface of my desk.
• 4:00: G-chat with friends back in the States.
• 5:30: Enjoy leaving work early.
• 6:30: Go with a work friend to see Black Swan at a movie theater downtown.

Tangent: This was my first movie experience in the Hague, and it was delightfully civilized. The movie theater is in a Beaux Artes building on one of the main pedestrianized squares downtown. When you buy your tickets, you choose your seats - an ingenious concept that both allows you to see how crowded the theater is before you commit to tickets and obviates any need to throw sharp elbows to get non-neck straining seats. Instead we could relax over a glass of wine and bar snacks in the lovely art deco bar of the movie house (which in the warmer months spills out onto the square) before walking into the theater right as the movie previews started. Even better, you can "subscribe" to the local movie house chain and go to as many movies as you like for less than the cost of two movie tickets per month. This could be the start of a very dangerous addiction...

• 10:00: Late sushi dinner at a tiny Japanese restaurant on a canal around the corner from my apartment. Unfortunately, sushi in Den Haag is nothing to write home about, but sometimes there's just an itch that needs to be scratched.
• 11:30: Contemplate joining another colleague at the wine bar on the way home. Decide instead to go directly to bed and sleep for 10 hours. Sweet.

I have, by the way, a personal philosophy that we should all have best-days-ever at least once a week: the day when the bus comes as soon as you get to the bus stop, and there's a window seat free; or when the Starbucks barrista accidentally makes you a grande instead of a tall; or when you get to catch up with friends for happy hour; or your loved one has dinner waiting for you when you get home from work. It's a stop-and-smell-the-roses sort of theory.

It's like riding a bike...

The last bike I owned was purple, and it had streamers coming out the handle bars and blue stars on the seat. Needless to say, my biking skills are a little rusty.

But Jeff has a fantasy of us riding Dutch bicycles together while holding hands. Given that it's against the (unspoken) law here to wear helmets, such dare devil antics will take practice. We started on Monday with a gentle ride in one of Den Haag's many parks: Haagse Bos.

I forget how nice it is to be in a wooded park, where you can't hear cars or city life. We biked along muddy paths and streams until we reached the Queen's residential palace, Huis ten Bosch. It was refreshing to realize that, even though we have been here three months already, there is plenty more of the Hague to explore. I am designating January as our "Explore Holland" month.

A Very Dutch New Year's

Based on our sample set of 1, there appear to be three grand traditions for ringing in the New Year, Dutch-style:

1. Fireworks

We are not talking here about the piddling American-style firecrackers you can buy on the local Indian reservation. No, in the Netherlands, you can buy full-scale fireworks -- and set them off anywhere, anytime, without adult supervision. Over the course of New Year's Eve day, it sounded like the heavy artillery had breached the outer defenses of the city; walking home from work, I realized it was on me to avoid stumbling through other people's firing grounds (also known as the sidewalk).

(This unbridled enthusiasm for fireworks, combined with the lack of bicycle helmets and ambivalence about icy sidewalks, has convinced me that the Dutch have no tort consciousness.)

When midnight struck, we had only to step outside to see fireworks in all directions -- of the type traditionally sponsored by municipalities back home, but here "donated" by the citizenry of Den Haag.

Two major side effects: (1) Setting off real fireworks in the middle of a city is LOUD -- aptly compared by a colleague to WWIII. (2) By 12:15 a.m., the air was acrid and dense with gunpowder (see picture - that is not fog). Despite these palpable externalities, the fireworks continued unabated through the wee hours.


2. Polar Bear Swim

As in many cold climes, the hardier members of the Dutch citizenry traditionally run into the local frigid body of water (here the North Sea) on New Year's Day. What I was unprepared for was the scale of spectation for this event. Granted, we showed up at 11:58 for a noon event, but the crowd was six deep along the length of the boardwalk and pier, and people were climbing trees and flagpoles and the last of the snow mounds to try to catch a glimpse of their more gullible compatriots. So we have no pictures, but here's what happened:

An indistinguishable but sizable mass of people topped with orange skull caps swarmed around the beach to some live Dutch oompa-loompa music. At noon, egged on by an undecipherable loud speaker and a wave of cheers from the fully dressed, the orange mass surged to the sea, but it was impossible to tell who was coming and who was going. At 12:04, it was over, and the spectators quickly dispersed.

But at least it got us to the sea on New Year's, which (as my grandfather used to say) blew the stink off us.

3. Olliebollen

Around the time of Sinterklas's arrival, olliebollen stands popped up overnight. The fried mounds of dough, however, are primarily a new year's tradition -- attested to by the gigantic lines at the stands on New Year's Eve.

Olliebollen comes plain or with raisins, or filled with other good things like apple pie filling. As I love doughnuts and apple pies, these were clearly my favorite. 
That said, fried dough is fried dough, and the olliebollen were surpassed (imho) by the amazing lemon rolls Jeff made as our own new year's tradition.

Apple Pie

There are in Den Haag a plethora of little twee cafes that serve basic sandwiches and homemade sweets on mismatched china. I was at our favorite (based on quality of coffee, value, and general homeyness)* with a new friend the weekend before Christmas. We both ordered apple pie - Dutch apple pie, which is a towering mess of diced apples, dried fruit, and crumbly crust.

Our very kind waitress explained that there wasn't much pie left, and also that it wasn't very good (I did not catch why she thought it wasn't very good, but at any rate she turned out to be wrong). She offered to bring us what they had left, with some whipped cream, for half price.

She re-emerged carefully balancing a large baking sheet with a third of an apple pie and roughly a cup of whipped cream mounded next to it. "I'm sorry," she explained, "it started to fall apart when I cut into it, so I just brought you everything we had." We didn't complain.

Half an hour of chatting later, we had made a major dent in the pie, but progress had significantly slowed. That was when the thin Dutch man, with whom we were sharing a large communal table, leaned over. "Excuse me," he said with an exceedingly polite Dutch accent. "I would like you to know that if you need any help with the problem you seem to be having," he inclined his head towards the pie plate, "I would be very happy to be of whatever assistance I can." And he smiled.

It took us a moment, but then we laughed and slid the baking sheet with the ruins of the apple pie over to him. A few minutes later, he slid it back to us. "As you can see," he informed us, "I have been able to take care of the problem. I am very happy that I could be of some assistance."

Four euros for a third of an apple pie and some cross-cultural bonding? Now that's a value.

* "Appeltje Eitje" (roughly, little apples little eggs)

Snowpocalypse, Den Haag edition

Holy icefield, Batman! I brought the Snowpocalypse of 2010 to the Hague!

What started as a heavy snowfall on Friday has grown by maybe an inch or six per day since. But it isn't the amount of snow that has me alarmed - it's that the snow is staying put.

Friday

Today

I don't mean that the snow isn't melting - though it's not. I mean that no one seems to be making any effort to move it.

Christmas shopping on an icefield

I can sympathize with a city government that doesn't own any snow plows because it "never snows". This is why a light dusting of snow can shut down Portland. But there is a further disconcerting cultural/legal difference I was not expecting: No one here clears their sidewalk. Not homeowners, not the government, not even businesses.

So five days later, it's more or less like it just stopped snowing two minutes ago. The snow on the roads is browner than that on the sidewalks, but otherwise it can be hard to tell where the sidewalks end and the streets begin. Or where the sidewalks are, period. Venturing outside is like an arctic expedition.

Sidewalk? Who needs a sidewalk?

But venture outside I must, because I will give the locals this: there is no capitulating to the snow here. Sure, the trams may stop running, and people may be slipping all over the sidewalks, but as fas as I can tell - since I cannot understand Dutch TV news - schools do not close, government offices do not have snow days, shops stay open, trash gets collected, drivers (particularly bus drivers) seem oblivious to the snow on the roads, and so I along with everyone else must suffer through two-hour commutes until things return to normal.

(Yes, there are still some hardy bicyclists out there, and yes, they do not wear helmets even when riding over snow and ice while sharing the road with cars likewise ill-equipped for the weather. And yes, I have seen at least two bicyclists wipe out in the middle of the road.)

I admire this chutzpah in the face of Snowmageddon II. But tonight I have to make my way to Schiphol Airport - a rail trip that has been challenging recently in good weather. Nervous? Yes. Ready for adventure? Yes. Eager to escape the icefield of Den Haag? Definitely.

Snow day!

It snowed all day today, and since I was doubtful of the reliability of the Dutch trams (this isn't Boston, or Copenhagen, you know), I stayed home. I won't bore you with details (they largely consist of me, a couch, a feather duvet, tea from Paris, and falling snow), but here are pictures of my view. It's a far cry from a couple months ago.