The new passageway (from Grote Markt to another shopping street) is making progress. You can see an artist’s drawing of what it will look like when finished.
And another image:
In other news, Marks & Spencer (a British retail store) will be finished on February 19. It’s also in the centrum of The Hague.
A few days ago Marco and I were walking through The Hague and I spotted this unusual graffiti on a shop barricade:
At first glance it didn’t look that unusual (not that most of the graffiti here can be considered ‘normal’) – but it quickly went from ‘pretty colors’ to ‘Hmmm. What am I looking at again?’
Over the last week or so I’ve seen a lot of Christmas trees around The Hague. One tree that I was not expecting to see was in De Passage. It’s not the best picture but it’s not a small tree either! (The black wall in the background is the construction area before the Apple store).
This was unexpected because of the agreement between a not-yet-opened Apple store and De Passage. In the contract between Apple and the shopping area, it was stipulated that there would be no more Christmas tree in the center as it would block the view of the storefront. Of course, people were quite annoyed by this. But Marco and I found out a few days ago that the tree was back! Only for this year, as a consolation because the Apple store isn’t yet open.
I also found a smaller Christmas tree at Central Station in The Hague:
Good news for Marco – the rest of his Christmas presents just arrived (via Amazon UK/PostNL) so he will have a present filled Christmas this year! He was even nice and went downstairs to get the package from the mailman. Nothing like waiting until the afternoon of Christmas Eve, but I ordered things pretty late this year.
Here are the Christmas lights that Bijenkorf put up a week or two ago:
The decorations are not actually strands of individual lights, but rather sections of net which descend down the entire length of the windows and have the lights woven into them.
In other news, I officially got the news last night that I passed all four sections of B1, so it is on to B2! There are two sections starting next month, both Tuesday/Thursday nights. One starts the 14th and one starts the 21st. The class will be done by the end of June. That seems like a far away date right now… but it is really not.
Last week was a trip to a garden center at the outskirts of The Hague (Tuincentrum Overvecht). Mostly to look at random Christmas items they had on sale. The “warehouse” feel of the place reminded me a lot of some American stores like K-mart which have garden centers…
On the way, we spotted a Dutch home which looked pretty enough to photograph. Considering I live in the center of The Hague, it’s sometimes weird to get this far out of the city and see what non-apartment living looks like. It’s about 7km distance from the city center.
It could pass for an American home — only the roof is made with different material.
Pretty.
A few days ago I took a walk to a different library in The Hague — Transvaalkwartier library in Hobbemaplein. I needed to check out a audio book (luisterboek) that was not available in the Central Library. It was recommended to me by a friend. Of course, I downloaded the tracks onto my computer but still need to put them into iTunes and transfer them to my iPhone. I always need to take that extra step due to not having a CD drive in my netbook. So I can’t tell you how interesting the story is quite yet.
But on the way there I did come across an odd looking sculpture. I am not quite sure what the meaning is behind it but it was colorful enough.
Things have been going well since my last blog post. It’s only a few more weeks until Marco and I’s honeymoon (yay) and it is almost time to start planning holiday events and dinners. And of course we have to figure out when we are going to watch the new Thor movie coming out (cool), although I am definitely more excited for the next Hobbit movie in December.
I enjoyed my week off school (due to herfstvakantie/fall vacation) but tomorrow it is back to a normal week. The best part about not having classes was not having to quickly make dinner and then rush off. But now it’s back to the grind, it seems! Just kidding.
Futurama is an American animated TV show which also appears on Comedy Central in the Netherlands (and Pirate Bay, but I digress…). Someone in The Hague is apparently a big fan of Bender, a robot character on the show.
That’s Bender on the right, holding a TV remote saying his trademark phrase: “Kiss my shiny metal …”, with the … included. I’m not sure who the other characters are, but they are not from the same TV show.
A few days ago I had to make a trip to Albert Heijn to get some groceries. On the way there I saw a flock of pigeons just lounging around listlessly. One of them was even lying down, not caring at all that people were walking only a few feet away from it.
The birds have a pretty good life in this city. Plenty of food and not many predators. We also have a lot of seagulls that hang around in The Hague. At first I thought they come over from the nearby beach in Scheveningen but they seem to hang around in The Hague year-round. I once saw 20-30 seagulls screeching loudly at some point across the street and dive bombing the area, only to realize after a few seconds that some woman had dumped a lot of old stale bread over the railing down to the street below. That bread was completely gone, with the exception of crumbs, in less than 30 seconds.
Of course, on the way back, the same pigeon pictured above was there, still not moving…
Yesterday Marco and I took a bus from Central Station in The Hague to Wassenaar, a nearby suburb of The Hague, for the birthday party of a friend’s kid. While we were waiting at the bus platform I decided to take a picture of a McDonald’s advertisement that seems to have sprung up everywhere in the last few days. (In actuality, most advertising spaces seem to go to the same advertisement, and the advertisements change every week. So you are usually bombarded by the same advertisement over and over.)
It’s a picture of a sundae (available in chocolate or caramel) with the tagline “ook lekker op Mondae”. Also tasty on Monday. While most of the tagline is in Dutch, they did not change the name of the day from the English Monday to the Dutch maandag for the joke, as that would kill the joke a bit.
Of course we did not stop at McDonald’s before going to Wassenaar, but we did stop at Starbucks in Central Station and split a vanilla latte. Yum. I can still vividly remember how excited Marco was when the first Starbucks arrived in Schiphol airport. Of course that worked well for him because he was constantly visiting America for the yearly Wrestlemania trip or the other 3-4 trips to see me.
It wasn’t much longer after that (a year or so) before the Starbucks opened in The Hague in the Central Station. But then it wasn’t as special, because you could just walk there to get a good coffee. You no longer needed to hop on a plane. ;p
Here’s some pictures of The Hague that I took over the last few weeks. The first one is a building across from the Noordeinde Palace, one of the three palaces for the royal family. Of course, I mostly took the picture because the window covers were a lovely shade of blue!
I also ended up taking a picture of a canal, though I forget where it was at or where I was going at the time. The flowers dominate the photograph, almost hiding the water completely:
Of course, as I already mentioned this is from a few weeks ago, before the weather went all cold and rainy!
Life in the Hague 