Last week Marco and I stopped by Urban Café for an afternoon coffee. My eyes were instantly drawn to the cappuccino muffin, which did not disappoint:
It went well with my creme brûlée latte (right) and Marco’s pumpkin spice latte (left). And we had a lovely view of the street Spui while we enjoyed it.
The Netherlands has survived its night of fireworks. We did see one drunk guy (still holding his bottle of alcohol) walk up to a police car waiting at a stop light and talk to police agent for a few minutes. Maybe he was simply wishing them a happy New Year, who knows. By the time we crossed the street the police car was on the move again.
There is also a YouTube video available from user VerdierMedia PuntNL where he/she uses a drone to capture the fireworks over The Hague last night. Check it out!
Marco and I made oliebollen yesterday! (Or: I supervised while he did almost all of the work.)
Yum yum yum. With a touch of powdered sugar on top. A New Year’s Eve treat.
Holiday Mickey Mouse would like to say hi:
This is in the Fred (an important shopping area and an international/expat area of The Hague).
Here’s a look at this year’s Christmas tree in De Passage (The passage):
And a close up of the Christmas ornaments:
Last week a colleague and I had some extra time on our hands after work so we decided to check out the Christmas section at Bijenkorf in The Hague. Here are some of the photos I took:
I always check out the Christmas section at Bijenkorf – they make some wonderful items. They come in different sizes and styles, so there is something for (almost) everyone.
I’m a big fan of public transportation and love reading everything about HTM trams, so I just had to share the photo I made about the check-in/check-out machine in one of the local trams:
For years these machines display gibberish about 50% of the time. The machine should read IN/UIT- CHECKEN at this moment, which it… mostly… does. But about 15 seconds prior ‘CHECKEN’ was actually ‘SLURKEN’. I’m not sure why exactly, but one letter randomly changes here and there and random symbols appear on the sides.
Maybe it’s all just a big puzzle we are supposed to figure out.
Check out the Christmas cookies that my colleague decorated on Friday. They were decorated during a themed ‘Ugly Christmas sweater’ event:
And they are just as tasty as they look! I had part of the one in the upper right – peanut butter and all spice, if I remember correctly.
Okay, I’ll admit – I don’t have a bike in the Netherlands so I am a bit biased with this post. However I was thrilled to hear that the shopping street on the Grote Markt would be closed to bikes this weekend+Monday and next weekend+Monday (article in Dutch). On a normal day it is dangerous trying to cross the street to get to the shops, but during Christmas…? Forget about it.
I’ll be honest – tourists and those not from The Hague have no clue where they should walk, which just angers cyclists even more. And I don’t think most cyclists know that there’s no official bike path on that street and that they should be adjusting their biking based on the movements of the pedestrian, and not vice versa.
If you’re interested, you can watch a time lapse of them re-doing Grote Marktstraat back in 2015. I will admit the street is much more beautiful now than it was, but the old street made it much more obvious that you were crossing a bike path.
Oh, and it’s still extremely busy in the city centre even without the cyclists!
It’s become a tradition – take a picture of the Christmas lights at Bijenkorf (a high-end department store – the name means beehive).
Here is 2019:
This year you have the addition of a digital advertisement board — which caused a bit of controversy when they were installed because of the noise and light pollution they caused. Things seemed to have died down since then, though.
Bijenkorf’s window displays are always a hit with the shopping crowd – each different than the last.
Life in the Hague 