After I woke up today I took a lot of pleasure in making sure my alarms were turned off for tomorrow morning. Marco and I both have a well deserved long weekend, although we don’t have any firm plans yet for how we will spend our time. Perhaps I will visit a few stores in the early morning before things get too busy or crowded, or we will go eat lunch on a terrace? We shall see. But I know I’ll be at the library sometime this weekend, that’s for sure.

The big news of the day is an unfortunate fire that tore through The Hague’s Schilderswijk district. It broke out around 03:00 this morning and quickly spread to neighboring apartments. Two streets were evacuated and in the end about 40 apartments were declared “unlivable”, along with a mosque in the same street. Regio15.nl in Dutch has pictures of the fire on Wouwermanstraat. Scroll to the end for pictures in the daylight.

In English the tweet reads: “A bit of rest after fighting the fire for hours”.

In the category of “Opps” or “Bad timing”: Dutch Eurovision winner Duncan Laurence tests positive for Covid from nltimes.nl. That is the previous winner of the Eurovision contest in 2019, who was scheduled to give a performance during this weekend’s finale. Instead, he goes into quarantine.

And, not something you see that often in the Netherlands: Arrests and one dead after armed robbery turns into high speed chase from dutchnews.nl. The attackers went after an armored transport suspected of carrying diamonds and gold (De Telegraaf said the estimate was upwards of 50 million euros). One of the suspects was killed. Here’s a line from the article: “What exactly happened is still being pieced together, but according to NOS while the robbery was in progress, one of the men, dressed in black and wearing a balaclava helmet, paced to and fro in front of the building, firing warning shots from an automatic rifle in the street.” Since it was a very busy street with pedestrians and cyclists, the police received a lot of emergency calls within a few minutes…