Foto’s

The construction smack in the middle of The Hague’s centrum area is progressing nicely – except that it’s annoying as heck when you have to get from point A to point B. But its perhaps a bit better now.

Marks & Spencer is the white building in the background, for random reference.

They have finished one half of the road (Bijenkorf,  Albert Heijn and Hema are on the left). As you can see the right side of the road is now blocked off.

Progress is not without causalities, of course. They are almost ready to start work on the next part of this street, Grote Markt, so the flower kiosk had to be permanently removed. As the story goes, it doesn’t fit with the “image” that the city wants to give after the construction is done. If you read Dutch you can check out this article (though there’s a few images to give you the general idea even if you do not speak Dutch). Bijenkorf is in the back of the first linked picture, to give you an idea of where the construction is heading.

Do you know what ‘construction’ is in Dutch? If you’re like me you might have said constructie (a lot of Dutch words seem to start the same and end with -ie) but alas, it is not. It’s verbouwing. Bouwen is ‘to build’ and the prefix ver ends up on a lot of Dutch words.

The Hague’s centrum area is a bit insane at the moment. Not only to you have them working on the Nieuwe Passage (a passage which links two main streets), and Marks & Spencer being built, you now have them tearing up the entire middle of the street, forcing voetgangers (pedestrians) to the left and fietsers (bicyclists) to the right. Crazy.

It’s getting to the point where I can’t quite remember what this place looked like when I was here on vacation a few years back, before any of this construction started!