While walking through De Passage last week I noticed a colorful sight by restaurant De Luca:
It was early in the morning so it wasn’t quite open yet. Which just meant I had a great opportunity to take a few photos.
And here is a close up:
Check out those prizes! €2.50 for 1 macaron, €25 for a box of 12. These are definitely seen as a luxury treat. If you are less picky you can go to the local Albert Heijn and get a box of 12 macarons for €5. Hmm. I am sure that is heresy to some folks, though.
A few days ago I was at the local Hema and I spotted some classic Dutch candy (oud hollandse mix).
It reminded me of visiting my grandparents. I am pretty sure they had a candy dish full of sweets like that (who didn’t?). The hard candy that sticks together, somewhat annoying for a kid because you have first try to pull them apart before you can enjoy one, but nice because they take so long to eat. I don’t remember them having much taste, but I could be wrong on that point.
Candy, candy, candy everywhere. Sometimes I miss being a kid that could eat half a bag of candy or a handful of cookies without a second thought. I do still have a weakness for Haribo gummy bears, though. But only if you stick them in the freezer first… I’m weird, I know.
A few months back the tourist information store (denhaag.com in English) moved from the ground floor of The Hague public library’s main branch to The Hague Central train station.
The tourist office now goes by the name “The Hague Info Store”. Oddly enough, they do also use (THIS) as an official acronym which I find a bit silly.
You can find the store around the corner from the playable piano. (Who knew there is a website which tracks publicly playable pianos throughout the world? See also pianos.pub/location/netherlands.)
They have a few Lego-like sets under the brand “Brickworld designs”.
The Hague specific souvenirs…
Dutch souvenirs.
You can also have a look at their webshop (souvenirdenhaag.nl, available in Dutch).
For Christmas I received a box of chocolate from Roger from an Amsterdam-based company I hadn’t heard of yet: Chocoladna. Normally they cater more to hotels and restaurants, but thanks to Corona and lockdowns the company has been forced to expand its horizons a bit.
Marco and I have been enjoying a piece each with coffee in the last week or so. Half the fun is trying to decide which one you want (the other half is misery for Marco because I take so long!). So far my favorites have been a hazelnut praline and a hazelnut crisp. Which is interesting because I don’t go out of my way to get hazelnut chocolate normally. So far everything we have tried has tasted great. Oh, and we like to joke that the larger red ball near the top is probably a sour ball and not chocolate at all, as a sort of prank.
Of course, you can also get the luxury option for € 449, which includes 50 chocolate truffles, 7 bottles of mini liquors and… a 7 inch LED tv screen!? See also the LXRY kist page. Admittedly it is mainly for use by companies, restaurants or hotels, and you can order chocolate truffel refills separately. The TV screen shows viewers how the chocolates are made and what ingredients are used.
For that price it is good to see that it is also personally delivered to you!
The Netherlands relaxed some of their lockdown measures last night, with restaurants, cafés, movie theatres, museums, zoos and more allowed to be open again from 05:00 to 22:00. Stores are also now open until 22:00 (during the last lockdown they needed to close at 17:00).
As you can expect the latest relaxation of measures led to a huge demand for tickets to the latest Spiderman film (which only ran for three days here in The Netherlands before the lockdown started last month). Right after last night’s press conference (or perhaps while it was still going on) people flooded Pathé‘s website to order tickets. The virtual queue was over an hour long (!).
List of lockdown changes at the Dutch government’s website in English.
Above: a random photo of De Passage, a covered shopping area and also an important passage to get from point A to B. Usually it is crowded, so I always feel lucky to get a photo of it with no one else in the shot (this time I lucked out because it was fairly early in the morning and the stores hadn’t opened yet).
Recently I stumbled on an article from Atlas Obscura about a Japanese man who has been writing letters to a Dutch hotel for over 40 years (!). Usually once a week, sometimes more. As of 2018 he has spent about 4,500 euros on stamps alone. The crazy thing is – he has never been to The Netherlands and has no plans to go there. The letters usually had the same message – asking about the weather and asking them to give his regards to all the members (employees). The hotel would sometimes write back, but they never received a different message.
The hotel (Art hotel Spaander) is located in Volendam, northeast of Amsterdam. A Dutch paper (Het Parool) stumbled on the mystery a handful of years back. After some investigation, they were able to travel to Japan to meet him. They even had a Dutch artist come along (as the Volendam hotel is an art hotel, they hoped to paint a portrait of him to hang in their hotel). When they asked the man why he was writing the letters, he explained that he was born on the 22nd, which was letter V in the alphabet. Also, his father was born in the year of the mouse, or nezumi in Japanese, which sounds a bit like “Netherlands” when pronounced. He also liked strawberries, which The Netherlands is apparently famous for (I didn’t realize).
If you are up for a bit of Google translate from Dutch to English, you can try this Google cache version of the Het Parool article, which goes into extensive detail about the mystery and trip to Japan.
The painting of Mr. Kaor for illustration, but note if you do not have a subscription with Het Parool it is better to click the Google cached version above this tweet (the Google cache version isn’t behind a paywall).
Back on the day that stores were allowed to reopen (January 15) I saw a curious find at Xenos. Xenos is a national chain here in The Netherlands. The Dutch Wikipedia page summarizes it well when they say Xenos specializes in selling “mass produced exotic goods”.
Well, apparently they also had a leftover stock of chocolate letters (English Wikipedia) from the Sinterklaas holiday, celebrated on 5 December. I know the stores had to close in mid-December due to the lockdown, but still! Albert Heijn and Hema always clear out their stock even before 5 December.
Of course, at this point they only had the most common letters (M) or some rarer ones (O, P). They still had all of the usual flavors, though. Milk chocolate, white chocolate, dark chocolate, hazelnut…
In other news, for the history buffs among us:
Digitalised Holland Amerika line passenger lists reveal famous names from dutchnews.nl. “The digital archive, which is kept at the Rotterdam city archive and accessible to the public, covers the period between 1900 and 1969 when millions of people made the journey [from Rotterdam to the United States] and took three years to complete.” Apparently Albert Einstein was also one of the regular passengers, as he frequently taught a course at nearby Leiden University. The direct link to the list is available here (stadsarchief.rotterdam.nl, in Dutch).
Here is a look at the Grote Marktstraat in The Hague’s city centre:
Off in the distance you can see a bit of mist. It was a bit cold, but not raining for once. Today was the first day that non-essentials shops are allowed to be open again, until 17:00. Corona cases are on the rise (the average is now around 31,000 cases a day) but hospitalizations seem to be okay for the moment. We will see.
Unfortunately restaurants and cafés will have to wait just a bit longer; they are still only open for takeout and delivery. The government said they would review the decision in about 10 days.
I did take advantage of the shops being open to buy the most boring stuff ever from Blokker – dish towels and descaler for the coffee machine. Quite boring indeed.
As noted, everything is closed at the moment due to the lockdown. With the exception of course of supermarkets, pharmacies and other essential stores. It doesn’t seem to help that much though, as the omicron wave has hit the Netherlands (nltimes.nl in English).
Here is a look at the Pathé movie theatre on the Spui:
In the background you can see the escalators leading up to the cashiers and theatres. As I blogged previously, at least we got to see Spiderman the day before lockdown started.
Of special note is the sign in the foreground: “We’ll be back… again and again”.
I received my booster shot earlier this morning. I feel pretty good, just a pretty sore arm and what feels like a light cold.
The appointment was by the World Forum (official website) in The Hague, a conference center. Apparently the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte also got his booster shot at the World Forum last week Thursday. The linked article is from ad.nl in Dutch but there are a few pictures to show you what the inside looked like. It was a different location than my first two vaccinations; those were at the Broodfabriek in Rijswijk (literally “bread factory” in English, although it was converted to an event hall years ago).
The location was fairly similar in setup to the Broodfabriek in Rijswijk. The main difference is that two people wait in the same area to get their vaccination; you can kind of see that in the first photo in the ad.nl article, although there the second chair is empty. This is useful because one person is getting their vaccination while the second person sits down, removes their coat, pulls up their sleeve, etc. And so the process repeats. All of this is done to try and get boosters administered as fast as possible (The Netherlands started late compared to other European countries so they have had to play catchup.)
Here is another example of more efficient methods: if you go to the Broodfabriek now for your booster, you receive a designated chair to sit at. The person giving the vaccination has a cart and they wheel the vaccinations to each person in the row (i.e. the person giving the vaccination moves around while the people receiving it stay put). This can be important in the case of The Netherlands as the health ministry recommended that everyone wait for 15 minutes after getting their vaccination before they leave. Not everyone does, of course, but it does make it a bit more efficient and limit movement. In my case at the World Forum I needed to move to a separate area called the “recovery area” before I could leave, so that is additional movement that the Broodfabriek doesn’t have with their setup.
Bonus: I got to see a rainbow on my way out.
The World Forum is behind me and not pictured. To the left is actually Europol, the European law enforcement agency. You can just make out the high fence on the left and the many obstacles alongside the road to prevent someone driving a car into this area.
Have a great weekend everyone. I am definitely looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow morning!
Life in the Hague 