Author Archives: Niki

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About Niki

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

Face masks in trams (Or: New experiences)

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Niki

Before this weekend, the last time I was in a tram was 13 March. Three months ago. I would have considered that unheard of before this corona pandemic started.

However on Friday morning I took tram 17 to Rijswijk after the morning rush hour. I’ve ridden at that time before, so I fairly certain it would not be busy. And I was right – it wasn’t. (Whew.)

It wasn’t too special, except that I almost forgot to check in. It’s definitely been a while. Everyone wore a face mask as required. And boy, did I have to get used to wearing one! I was glad to not have my glasses on otherwise I would have to worry about them fogging up. But it was instantly warm and I instantly wanted to take it off. But I survived. I can’t imagine wearing one at every moment that you are outside, but I know a lot of countries require that.

I also took the tram on Saturday, this time tram 3, for the blood donation appointment I wrote about yesterday. That one was fairly empty at 08:20 when I went to the appointment, but was definitely busy when I came back around 09:45. It’s nothing compared to the pre-corona traffic, and was still at acceptable levels for social distancing, but it still felt weird.

In other news:

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World Blood Donor Day (Or: Only an hour of your time)

Posted on June 14, 2020 by Niki

Today is World Blood Donor Day. As some of you might be aware I donated blood when I used to live in America and I currently donate blood in the Netherlands. I donated yesterday, coincidentally.

All blood donors received an email which included a link to an online pdf. It was a really interesting read (it was about blood donation in general and blood donation during corona times). However since it is a pdf you will need to know Dutch to read it unfortunately. But the pdf also includes a design originally drawn by Dick Bruna in 1974 for the Dutch blood bank. It’s so cute!

design by Dick Bruna (1974). Image taken from the pdf at: https://www.sanquin.nl/binaries/content/assets/sanquinnl/bloedverwant/bloedverwant_nr01_2020_spreads.pdf

It is a bit different donating in the Netherlands (but only a bit):

  • blood donations are handled by Sanquin, a non-profit organization
  • to donate blood you go to one of the Sanquin locations (unlike America where they go to libraries and schools and hold blood drives)
  • before you can donate blood the first time you need to visit a Sanquin location where they do an intake exam and draw a bit of blood for testing purposes
  • if your intake exam goes well you will be put on their register as a blood donor. You need to wait for them to contact you to come donate blood, every time.
    • gender matters – males are allow to donate up to five times a year, women up to three times a year (for whole blood – plasma is every two weeks and uses appointments)
    • blood type matters – the Netherlands is a small country and blood doesn’t last long, so some blood types are get called in more often
Continue reading →
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Field outside of Rijswijk Station (Or: Okay, it’s tiny)

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Niki

Here’s an interesting photo from just outside of Rijswijk train station. I’m not entirely sure what the wooden columns are supposed to represent, but hey, it’s a bit of green. With a church steeple in the background. But it’s tiny – even Google Maps doesn’t mark this area as green to represent a park.

In other news:

  • As you might know, the football European championships are delayed until 2021. The Dutch TV show Even tot hier had a short skit about the players being replaced this year by dogs for the EK hondenvoetbal (from Youtube, 2 and a half minutes long). Even if you don’t speak Dutch, it’s still a cute video because you get to watch dogs!
  • Dutch sign up to Oxford University’s Covid-19 vaccine from dutchnews.nl. The Netherlands (and Germany, Italy and France) have signed up to purchase up to 400 million doses of a Covid-19 vaccine from Oxford University. Of course, there’s no guarantee that this particular vaccine will work, but the thinking is that it’s better safe than sorry later. Other countries are welcome to join the group.
  • No summer holiday? Councillors propose ‘wild swimming’ in the river from dutchnews.nl. Yeah… no thanks.
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Terraces on the way to Den Haag HS (Or: Blue skies)

Posted on June 12, 2020 by Niki

The grey skies briefly disappeared this afternoon. It gave me a great opportunity to take a picture of the terraces near the Holland Spoor (HS) train station.

In other news:

  • Amsterdam plants mini-gardens around bins in drive to cut littering from theguardian.com – in the Netherlands you generally have either trash pick up once a week or your street has underground trash containers like those pictured in the article. The main drawback to underground containers is the likelihood that people will simply leave their trash next to the container if it is already full.
  • Verzorgingshuis ‘Het Uiterjoon’ wint het vaatje Hollandse Nieuwe from omroepwest.nl – the first herring catch of the year is always a big deal in the Netherlands, especially in Scheveningen with Vlaggertjesdag (Flag Day). Originally it marked the day fishing ships left Scheveningen to catch herring, but these days it marks when that season’s herring can legally be sold. Normally the first barrel of about 45 herring is sold at auction with the proceeds going to charity and then the following day the sale of herring is allowed nationwide. To give you an example of the prices, in 2012 the first barrel was auctioned for €95,000. However, due to the corona crisis the first two barrels were instead given away – one barrel went to a German hospital for their assistance with coordinating ICU patients (article in Dutch from duitslandinstituut.nl). The other barrel went to a Dutch nursing home, which you can read about in the original article above.
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Flowers alongside a canal (Or: Maliestraat)

Posted on June 11, 2020 by Niki

Here’s a cute photo for today:

This is a canal at Maliestraat which is not far from – some of you might guess this – Malieveld. It was a bit of a grey day, just like today. A bit of rain here, a bit of rain there. Not enough to bring out your umbrella.

In other news:

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Small Dutch streets (Or: A look down Korte Koediefstraat)

Posted on June 10, 2020 by Niki

Today’s photo comes from the Korte Koediefstraat, or Short Cow thief street. No joke. I posted about the nearby Koediefstraat a few weeks back, if you want to read about why the street is called that.

In other news:

  • you can take part in Quarantinekunst or Quarantine art. Artists have been placing artwork in their windows or garden, visible from the public street. Non-artists have offered up their windows and gardens for someone else’s art to be put on display. You can also donate to the cause. See the map of where the pieces of art can currently be found.
  • 68,759 people have been tested for the corona virus so far under The Netherlands’ policy of now testing any resident who requests it. This period is from 1 June to 9 June (yesterday). Most test results come back in 48 hours, although the original promise was to have test results within 24 hours. About 2.1% of the tests have come back positive. See also the NOS live blog from today.
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Roses and plaques (Or: Along the Zuidwal)

Posted on June 9, 2020 by Niki

Happy Tuesday everyone. At least it is not raining…

Here are a few more photos from my walk along the Zuidwal last week. There were some eye-catching roses decorating some of the houses along the canal:

There were also a high proportion of mobility scooters in this area. You can just see one in the background behind the flowers.

I also saw a plaque marking the former residence of a famous writer:

That writer was Eduard Douwes Dekker, better known by his pen name Multatuli (Wikipedia.com). He is best known as the writer of Max Havelaar, a 1860 novel which cast a negative light on the issues with colonialism in the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. I’ll admit I haven’t read it yet as it doesn’t really fit with the type of reading I normally do.

In other news:

  • Do you have issues with wearing a face mask and glasses at the same time which causes your glasses to start to fog up? If your face mask has elastic bands, try crossing them over your ears first to tighten up the face mask a bit. See also this image from i.imgur.com which I found on Reddit. I’ve also heard you should try cleaning your glasses with dish soap and then drying them with a glasses-friendly cloth. That leaves a tiny layer a soap on your glasses which can usually protect against your glasses fogging up – though not always unfortunately.
  • Opinion sharply divided about using an app to trace coronavirus cases (dutchnews.nl). Considering there was a data leak in the Dutch COVID-19 website Infectieradar last week, I can see why people are a bit nervous to download it (when it becomes available)
  • HTM blij met staatssteun: ‘Tien miljoen euro verlies in plaats van zeventig miljoen’ (omroepwest.nl) – HTM [The Hague’s public transportation company] is happy with the government’s support: 10 million euros loss instead of 70 million. Government support of Dutch public transportation companies is required due to the government asking them to run their full schedule even when passenger numbers are down. In that way the government can be sure that there is enough space for passengers who are using public transportation during this time.
Categories: The Hague, Transportation | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Archways (Or: Looking towards the Muzenstraat)

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Niki

Earlier today Marco and I went for a short, quick walk. One of the places we walked through was the Muzenplein (translated to something like ‘Plaza of muses’).

The archway is what caught my eye. In the distance you see Muzenstraat (‘Street of Muses’). I like the use of browns and cyans in the building facades.

In other news:

  • Strandrobot raapt peuken op in Scheveningen: Gemeente Den Haag is eerste klant from ad.nl – Beach robot picks up cigarette butts in Scheveningen: The Hague government is the first customer
  • Tim Akkerman geeft toch geen concert in een vliegtuig from ad.nl – Tim Akkerman won’t be giving a concert in an airplane after all. The singer from the band The Ivy League was not happy with the Dutch prime minister saying vacations to some other European countries could restart from 15 June – with every airplane seat filled – while Dutch musicians are still not allowed to give open air concerts. He said he would rent out a large plane that would stay on the ground and give a concert for 500 fans. In the end, it looked like he was just trying to wake up the government a bit to their illogical thinking
  • Vrouw rijdt met brandende auto naar tankstation langs A1 from nos.nl – Woman drives her burning car to a gas station off the A1 highway. What the? Luckily gas station workers saw her coming and hit the emergency shutoff button just in time.
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What is your R number? (Or: Corona dashboard)

Posted on June 7, 2020 by Niki

Last week the RIVM (Dutch ministry of Health) released a prototype of the Corona dashboard which can be found at coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl.

As you can see it shows things like ICU intakes and hospital intakes averaged over the last three days (6 and 8.7), number of infected persons per 100,000 residents (9.9) and the very well known R number, which is currently 0.87. There are also data points about nursing homes and a list of data points they are looking to add in the coming weeks.

In completely other news: sometimes trips to the grocery store can be very, very interesting. Today I wanted to grab a water bottle however there was already another customer there looking at multipack water bottles. Okay, he was right in front of what I needed, so I decided to wait. Even in non-corona times, it would have probably been perceived as rude, and it’s not like he would take that long right?

Wrong. After 2 minutes of semi-patient waiting I decided to look at my watch to start timing the rest of this experience. He had a pack of water in his basket already and he would grab another slightly different pack and look at the label. He would then put it into his basket and then pick up something else and look at the label of that water pack.

After the first minute someone else stopped and was clearly waiting to grab something from the water as well. After three minutes I did start to get a bit impatient, but tried to keep it from showing on my face. It must have been obvious that I was still standing there waiting, right? The other person was behind him on the other side of the aisle, so I could forgive him not seeing her. In the meantime about 15 people walked down the middle of the aisle, probably wondering what the heck the bottleneck was. But this was the last item I needed to get, and I was morbidly curious to see how this would play out.

After switching out the multipacks in his basket about 5 times, and staring at labels about 10 times, he finally picked one, grabbed the rest of his stuff and got a move on. The other customer politely waited for me to grab my water which I quickly did. Her and I shared a smile, neither believing what we had just experienced. I whispered fijne dag while deftly grabbing my water with my left hand. Total time it took him: 5+ minutes. Total time it took me: about half a second.

But now I have a good story for the blog, so it was worth the extra five or so minutes, right?

Categories: Daily Dutch living, Everyday purchases | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

An empty Malieveld (Or: Preparations for an anti-lockdown protest)

Posted on June 6, 2020 by Niki

Earlier today I took a walk around the Malieveld, which you’ll know happens a few times a week. But this time there was an unexpected amount of police: a handful of police outside the area, another handful at the entrance, another 4 or 5 on bicycles, and another 5 or 6 in the far corner watching a stage being set up.

There wasn’t too much to see yet, but something was definitely about to happen. It turns out it was preparations for an anti-lockdown demonstration which would happen in the afternoon:

Of course, there’s not a lockdown as such, or at least not a lockdown like what other European countries have had. However they are also protesting against the 1.5 meters requirement that everyone has to follow.

The minister of Health is looking to create a new set of corona laws to replace the emergency ordinances each city has set up to deal with the corona crisis. The benefit of that is that the law would be the same throughout the country, versus differing based on what city you were in. But putting something in the law books does feel more tangible, more permanent. So it is easy to understand the angst that some citizens have over a crisis that might not go away next year, or even the year after, and the thought that this crisis has only taken away personal freedoms. (See also Nieuwe coronawet moet einde maken aan verwarring over maatregelen at rtlnieuws.nl).

There’s even the question of personal data being illegally used – right now in the Netherlands you need to make a reservation to eat inside a restaurant, and undergo a health check when you enter. What if that information later falls into the wrong hands? Speaking of which: Lek in RIVM-coronasite: gegevens van gebruikers makkelijk in te zien at nos.nl – there is apparently a significant data leak at a website run by the Dutch ministry of Health. The website allows Dutch residents to report if they have had corona-like symptoms in the last week. Opps.

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