Author Archives: Niki

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About Niki

I run the blog http://www.lifeinthehague.com

Sliding away… (Or: Collapsing canal wall in Amsterdam)

Posted on September 1, 2020 by Niki

Here’s a strange news story from today:

The good news is that no one was hurt. And for those of us who like to see the destruction in action, there’s a 21 second video over at this nos.nl news article: Kademuur in centrum Amsterdam deels ingestort.

It’s Tuesday, so the Dutch public health institute has released the weekly Covid-19 numbers (from rivm.nl, in English). It’s actually good news, to a degree: we’re either stable in comparison to last week (number of infections) or doing slightly better (number of hospitalizations and deaths). Because there are more people getting tested, the number of positive tests has gone down as well. The only less than thrilling news is that The Hague has more infections than last week – 331 this week versus 278 last week.

There was also a press conference tonight, about six months after the first coronavirus patient was reported in the Netherlands. I can’t believe it’s been six months! The biggest update was that nightclubs and discotheques are not yet allowed to reopen, with no reopening date set at this time. The prime minister talked about how we are getting frustrated with the situation but we need to stay alert, especially as schools are reopening and people are coming back from vacation.

The Dutch corona app CoronaMelder (Corona reporter) will be delayed until about half September so that testing locations can be expanded first. It should have been in use nationally from today. It is currently in testing, and anyone who receives a notification from the test app can get tested without symptoms. However, at the moment the general country is being asked to only get tested if they have symptoms. These two policies obviously don’t match, hence the slight delay.

There’s more on the press conference over at nltimes.nl: Nightclubs to remain closed, frustration with Covid rules is understandable.

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Let’s just skip to Christmas (Or: Kruidnoten spotted!)

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Niki

Marco spotted some kruidnoten (Wikipedia) by the local Albert Heijn today. If you’re keeping track, today is 31 August. Traditionally they appear in the grocery stories by 1 September, although we spotted them on 23 August back in 2018. So we seem to be on track this year.

Flavored kruidnoten are also available already. Caramel sea salt, white chocolate, truffle, stroopwafel…
And some speculaas

Marco was sweet and bought some gevulde speculaas (Albert Heijn recipe) for us. It is speculaas cookies filled with almond paste. Yum yum yum.

Of course you can’t blame anyone for wanting to skip to Christmas (and New Year’s, and 2021…) in these crazy times. Give me a shout when you put up your Christmas tree. Good riddance to 2020, I say!

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Good news! (Or: Longer opening hours at the Central Library)

Posted on August 30, 2020 by Niki

Being the book nerd that I am, I am happy to read that The Hague’s Central Library would go back to its normal opening hours starting tomorrow, 31 August. The library branches in Escamp, Scheveningen and Segbroek will also have their normal opening hours from tomorrow. The rest of the libraries will hopefully go back to their normal opening times in the beginning of October.

Personally, I’m quite happy about this, as I used to make a quick trip to the library after work. But with the corona opening hours being 12:00-17:00 Monday-Saturday, this usually wasn’t possible. And something always came up to prevent me from going on Saturday…

View of the Central Library from Pathé Spui (movie theatre chain), March 2019

And if that does not give you enough of your library fix, the Central Library is also holding their annual book/film/cd sale next Sunday, 6 September from 12:00-17:00, on the 3rd floor. Or the 4th floor, if you’re American (see Wikipedia’s article about floor numbering in different cultures). Heh.

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Finally (Or: Weekend!)

Posted on August 29, 2020 by Niki

I always joke that workdays go by really fast – but weekends go by even faster. I’m glad when they finally come around again, but just about the time I start to relax it’s time to start work again.

Today we made okonomiyaki (Japanese pancakes, you choose the filling) for a late lunch/early supper. Even though I was not the one julienning the carrots, I still managed to cut myself on the device while trying to clean it. Ow! Typing with a band-aid can be a bit difficult at times.

But I’ll still leave you with a feel good story – Pierre the rockhopper penguin, rehabilitating at a zoo in Perth. Apparently he passes his time in isolation by watching penguins on an iPad (from far away zoos like in Kansas City in the US and the a zoo in Scotland). He also spends his iPad time watching Pingu, a clay animation TV show about a family of penguins. Awww.

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Fuze tea (Or: Free treats in the city centre)

Posted on August 28, 2020 by Niki

Today Marco visited the city centre to do a bit of shopping. Lucky guy had the day off! But he did take a photo for me (thank you). It turns out he found a fuze tea stand handing out free samples:

He chose the blueberry jasmine flavor and remarked about how they tried to make the giveaway corona proof. Normally it’s a chaotic group of people standing around, cutting in line, hoping to get in and out quickly. But today they had a line (see above) with self-service – you reach into the display case and grab your own tea. Which had the nice benefit that they don’t open the drink and then hand it to you to drink right away.

Today’s weather in short: sudden buckets of rain that fall onto your head without warning, lasting about 5-10 minutes, while a blue sky shines mockingly above you. And cold weather. Much colder. Apparently we went from an extreme heat wave to lower-than-average temperatures. Hmph.

Have a good weekend everyone!

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There’s a controversy brewing (Or: Do you speak Scots?)

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Niki

I’ll keep it short today, but I did want to point out one interesting article I read yesterday. But warning – it’s a bit nerdy!

Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia from theguardian.com. Apparently a 19 year old US teenager is responsible for over half of the edits on the Scottish Wikipedia. He started when he was 12. The problem? He doesn’t speak Scots. And he created over 20,000 pages (as of 2018), which is about a third of the Scots Wikipedia. Most of the pages and edits were English with some words spelled “phonetically” in what can only be described as a cliche of Scots.

And how did it get this far? From what I’ve read his time on Wikipedia plays a bit part – the longer you are on Wikipedia the more seniority you are granted, so he received administrator rights some years ago. He was then able to undo edits people had made to try and correct his work.

It’s a crazy story, but the good news is this will probably (with a lot of work and effort) cause a great clean-up of the Scots Wikipedia. Unless they nuke it entirely and start over, which is one of the proposed actions over on the talk page (!). I actually attended a Dutch Wikidata convention in the past in Amsterdam (Wikidata being the ‘data’ side of Wikipedia) and I was quite impressed with some of the scripts and tools people made over the convention weekend. I do think they can get through this – and I do hope the user in question does keep editing as it can be a useful hobby. But perhaps he should stick to English Wikipedia until he learns the Scots language…

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Shopping is dangerous? (Or: Issues with corona banners in Amsterdam)

Posted on August 26, 2020 by Niki

A few weeks back, Amsterdam began an experiment with face masks in certain busier parts of the city (amsterdam.nl). The experiment runs through the end of August, after which it will be evaluated to see if face masks will still be required. This has been a bit controversial, with some store owners reporting that revenue is down up to 40% in comparison with other Dutch shopping streets that do not have this requirement (nltimes.nl).

Some of the streets also have banners hung up between the buildings letting people know which side of the street they should be walking on (see Tweet below).

The problem is that the bottom of the banner contains small pipes to help weigh them down so they do not move around that much in the wind. And what did we have yesterday evening and today? A huge wind storm. It turns out that the pipes were not properly secured, meaning there was a risk that the pipes would fall out, possibly injuring shoppers in the process. Opps! The streets were closed for 3-4 hours today while the fire department removed all of the pipes.

In other news:

  • Cafés violating customer privacy with Covid contact data (nltimes.nl). Restaurants, cafés and terraces must now ask you for your contact details, per the Dutch government. It’s not required that you leave your contact details, but it is strongly encouraged. I’m sure the stories linked above won’t help the government’s case, though. Example: a journalist left her contact details at a restaurant. Shortly after she left the restaurant she received a phone call from the bartender asked if she wanted to have a drink with him sometime. What???
  • Overvallen door een plensbui? Weerapps minder betrouwbaar door afname vliegverkeer (omroepwest.nl). The title is: Do you find yourself in the middle of an unexpected, quick rain shower? Weather apps are less trustworthy now that there are less flights taking off. The article talks about just that – when a plane takes off it automatically measures the outside temperature and wind speed as it rises in height. That information is also passed on to the Dutch weather service to help predict weather changes. During the lockdown (when flights were very scarce) the Dutch weather service released an extra weather balloon to gather additional data points for their weather reporting.
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Don’t get blown away (Or: Storm Francis knocks on the door)

Posted on August 25, 2020 by Niki

Heat wave? What heat wave? The weather has definitely changed. I was actually a bit cold in bed last night! Scandalous.

Storm Francis poised to hit the Netherlands, winds of up to 80kph expected from dutchnews.nl. There’s also an article at omroepwest.nl (in Dutch) about the preparations The Hague is taking to minimize any damage from storm Francis. Think of things like breaking down beach equipment or closing roads which have already seen branches break off recently. The city is also strategically placing cables in trees on the Lange Voorhout to make sure if a branch breaks the entire tree doesn’t come down. Those really are beautiful trees, so I can see why they want to protect them (photo from a blog post earlier this month):

And, amusingly enough, there’s a bouncy castle festival going on in the region. The organizers mentioned that the festival would be cancelled tomorrow and they would be letting the air out of the cushions in preparation for the storm coming this evening. Seriously, a bouncy castle festival. How cool is that. My six year old self probably would have loved that.

Of course, nothing will top the wind storm of 2018. Yeesh.

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Of course there’s a book for that (Or: The first corona novel is spotted)

Posted on August 24, 2020 by Niki

Here in the Netherlands we already have at least one corona related novel, a novel that I spotted earlier this month at the library. The theme is about two strangers, both writers, who meet each other at a vacation park and start to fall in love amidst the chaos of corona, social distancing, quarantine and hoarding. But I decided not to check it out, thinking that anything written that fast can’t be good. And I’m not a big fan of romance novels anyway, even if it’s only a side theme.

And you know what the crazy thing is? When I was looking up a review of Quarantaine I found one dated 15 May 2020 from Het Parool. 15 May! That’s just over two months, three at the very most, from idea to publication – that’s insane. The reviews over at bol.com (like Dutch Amazon) are a bit better, at least. It gets four stars over there. But still. Romance? No thanks.

If you read Dutch, I’ll recommend instead Het Station by Joris van Casteren. Joris spends some months at Amsterdam Centraal back in 2014 or so, gathering stories of conductors, security guards, passengers, cleaners, the homeless and more. It was quite interesting but that’s probably because I’m a fan of trains and trams and metros and… you get the idea.

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Thai workshop (Or: First time at FOAM – The Kitchen)

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Niki

Last week Sunday Marco and I went to FOAM – The Kitchen to attend a Thai cooking workshop. This was the first cooking workshop that I have attended in my life, so I was a bit nervous about how things would go. But it worked out nicely and we had a lot of fun!

Due to the corona measures there were less participants than normal, only 8 this time. Each participant was in charge of one recipe. Marco and I took the okonomiyaki recipe (a small Japanese pancake) and a pineapple with nuts recipe. Check out Marco cooking the okonomiyaki (yum):

The base is cabbage, with shredded carrots, spring onions, sesame seed, flax seed, fresh garlic, fresh ginger and more. It was also my first opportunity using a Magimix machine which shredded the carrots and cabbage in half a second. Crazy!

We also made a pineapple dish, topped with a paste consisting of: walnuts, red peppers, onions, sunflower seeds, tamari (a type of soy sauce, in this case gluten free) and more. The topping made it hearty, so it isn’t quite a dessert.

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