Random news for a Monday (Or: Brexit and cars stuck on train trucks)

Posted on March 22, 2021 by Niki

From last week: Demand for gardeners shoots up as coronavirus turns gardens into refuges, dutchnews.nl. Makes sense, since most of us are spending all of our time at home these days. Apparently gardeners are already fully booked for April and May. Of course you first need space for a garden…

Brexit deficit: Dutch shops in a pickle over British favourites, also at dutchnews.nl. I have seen this first hand, with empty fridges at Kelly’s Expat Shopping, over on Zoutmanstraat in The Hague. Their fresh meat and cheese options have definitely been hit hard since Brexit went into force at the beginning of the year.

But I did snag some liquid French Vanilla coffee-mate for Marco. That stuff is like gold – it’s only in stock once or twice a year, so you have to be fast.

Apparently a minor was waiting in the car and somehow it went into reverse, crashing through a gate and ending up directly on the train tracks. Opps?

And, not really Dutch related at all, but if you want to try your hand at choosing the next set of Monopoly community chests cards, Hasbro is running a contest to refresh the set: Monopoly cards get complete new makeover from nltimes.nl. You will see two community chest cards at a time. You pick the one you like more and then another set appears. Here is a direct link to the contest at monopolycommunitychest.com. Think of things like: “You rescue a puppy–and you feel rescued too! Get out of jail free card” versus “Your friends video chat you through a tough day. Get out of jail free card”. In honor of these strange corona times I went with the second option.

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Time for some healthiness (Or: Broccoli salad with spectacular cashew dressing)

Posted on March 21, 2021 by Niki

Tonight’s meal was a broccoli salad with smoked almonds, grapes, dates, baby tomatoes and peanuts (to name a few ingredients). The star of the dish was hands down the smoked cashew dressing. Of course it came from FOAM in The Hague. It tasted quite healthy but so delicious at the same time.

It was interesting to have sweet elements like dates and green grapes in a dinner, but everything meshed well together.

I will admit I peeked ahead at the options for this coming Friday – the first option is a sushi bowl and the second option is Spanish stew. Definitely leaning towards the Spanish stew myself… However the sushi bowl sounds intriguing because it includes “watermelon tuna”, aka watermelon that is prepared with Japanese ingredients to make it look and taste like tuna. Here is a recipe for watermelon tuna from bhg.com, Better Homes & Gardens. Quite interesting!

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Origami display at the Nespresso store (Or: In the Passage)

Posted on March 20, 2021 by Niki

Here are some beautiful blue origami swans for you:

This was at the Nespresso store in The Passage.

You can also see blue Nespresso cups in this close up:

Based on the pattern on the blue cups, I suspect that the flavor is Tokyo vivalto lungo, which has “delicate floral and fruity notes”. I’m not a big fan of Nespresso, though. I’d rather have a regular sized cup of coffee than an espresso.

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That’s a big bag of fries (Or: Value bag at Albert Heijn)

Posted on March 19, 2021 by Niki

This evening Marco and I had a hamburger and fries for our Friday meal. Think of things like: burger, jalapeños, onions, lettuce, habanero tabasco sauce… (oh, and cheddar cheese for Marco). It was so good I forgot to take a photo!

While purchasing crinkle cut fries for this dinner–yum, yum, yum–I noticed a large bag of fries at the bottom of the freezer at Albert Heijn, a Dutch grocery store. It was so huge it didn’t even fit on the shelf anymore.

The bag on the right, krokante friet (crispy fries). It is apparently 2.5 kilos of fries. That’s 5.5 pounds. Yikes! It was a “value” bag that only cost €2.

On the other hand, if it had been 2.5 kilos of crinkle cut fries… yum yum yum?

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Voting in the 2021 Dutch elections (Or: City hall)

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Niki

The 2021 Dutch elections (English Wikipedia) were held yesterday. Marco decided to cast his vote at The Hague’s city hall. Marco took a quick photo for me, aiming more at the ground to avoid getting anyone in the photo.

As you can see, everything was set up according to corona guidelines. Marco said later that it was set up rather well – there were volunteers controlling the lines, there was plenty of space between the voting booths and there was a separate entrance and exit. You entered by the library and then exited on the other side of city hall. (Check out a photo I took of city hall back in 2013, right after I moved to the Netherlands – there is a LOT of space.)

Above is random voting “paraphernalia” that Marco received, including a card with corona related questions and instructions about how to make your visit to the voting location as safe as possible, both for yourself and others. Also, special for this year only: most voters were allowed to keep the red pencil that they used to vote. Usually they are chained to the desk. However not all voters were allowed to keep the pencil. The choice was up to the city since they would have to finance the red pencils with their voting budget. Some cities decided it was more cost effective to clean them between each use instead.

Differences in cities also meant there were differences in pencils – some cities provided short, little pencils like above. Others provided longer red pencils with “Jouw stem telt!” or “Your vote counts!” printed on the side.

In COVID-19 election, Dutch voters ask: Can I keep the pencil? from reuters.com.

And of course the red pencils were already appearing on Markplaats (the Dutch eBay) early yesterday morning. Not that anyone should be surprised by that!

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Japanese ramen (Or: Photo from two years ago)

Posted on March 17, 2021 by Niki

Check out this photo of Japanese ramen:

This photo is from March 2019 and it was taken in Tokyo. Not by me, though. Roger and Marco visited Japan for a week and a half. I stayed in the Netherlands because I wasn’t sure what my work situation would be like, and let’s face it – I wanted the boys to have some “guy time”.

I have heard the story many times by now. Marco and Roger were actually looking for a different restaurant which was highly rated by another friend, but they didn’t find it so they went to this one instead. When they entered they needed to use a machine to order their food, which meant they needed help on how to use the machine. It was their first day in Tokyo and all. It was kind of funny considering they were the only two customers at that time of night. Once the worker helped them figure out the machine they ordered and he took the ticket it spit out. Although learning how to use the machine probably proved to be valuable knowledge for other restaurants.

While ordering they were asked how many noodles they wanted. I believe the choices were 300 grams, 400 grams or 500 grams. They ordered 500 grams without realizing just how much that is, which you can see in the photo. But I am told it was worth it! The dish above is Tsukeman (English Wikipedia) or “dipping ramen”. You dip the noodles into the broth and then eat them. Marco tells me the broth was quite spicy and stronger in taste because it is meant for dipping. At the end you ask for water to add to the broth and then eat the leftover broth.

Here is hoping they can return to Japan next year!

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An odd anniversary (Or: A year of working from home)

Posted on March 16, 2021 by Niki

I recently celebrated an odd anniversary. It has been a year since I started working from home full time. My last day in the office was March 13, 2020. See also my blog post from that weekend. (It is crazy to read that at first they were limiting groups to 100 people. Since December we can only have one guest visiting.)

To go into the office I need to have a good reason and have permission from both my department’s manager and the building manager. In the last year I have been there twice – once to pick up my new laptop (August?) and once to return my old laptop (October? It was slightly delayed because corona cases started going up around then). The office is outfitted with directional arrows and there are designated elevators for going up and for going down. I couldn’t quickly find the one that was designated “down” so I ended up taking the stairs.

On the plus side, my employer was fully ready to work from home from day one. We had recently switched over to Teams and we use Sharepoint (group network share) and OneDrive (generally personal network share, but can also be shared with groups). The “funny” thing was that the office was planning on working from home on the afternoon of Monday, March 16 to test the VPN. However the situation changed so fast that our VPN “test” was everyone logging in on Monday and getting to work. Luckily not everyone needs the VPN, however with my line of work my first action when I boot up my computer is to log into the VPN and my last action before turning off my computer is to log off the VPN. So yeah, I need it.

Marco and I live in a tiny apartment that doesn’t quite support two home workers, but we make it work. I think I held out until August or so last year before I finally caved and said we should get at least one proper work desk and chair. We only had to wait a week or two and I splurged on a desk which allows you to change the height electronically. I also splurged on an extra setup fee to have the company do it for us. I’d rather pay €50 than spend hours staring at instructions, thank you very much.

These days the only pain point is when we both have meetings. In that case one of us moves to the bedroom. Luckily I have less meetings than Marco so it doesn’t happen that often. Which is probably good, since the bedroom wifi is less than ideal.

Generally we don’t have any issues with the current working from home solution, but it is still crazy to think we have been at home for over a year now. My company let me know all the way back in December that we would be working from home at least through August 2021. Crazy.

At least we have the upcoming spring and sun to look forward to. Today it just drizzled, raining on and off. Boo!

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Safety first (Or: Race barriers at biking events)

Posted on March 15, 2021 by Niki

Let’s stick with some random news today.

I saw an interesting article on NOS.nl in Dutch: Gratis af te halen: veilige finishstraat voor wielerkoersen or “Free to pick up: Safe finish barriers for cycling courses”. I found a similar article in English from cyclingtips.com. A Belgian company made safety barriers for the last 400 meters of cycling competitions and are offering them for free. (In exchange the pieces are branded with their name so that they get exposure.)

The most interesting things about the barrier are:

  • they are sloped 70 degrees from the ground back to the spectator, making it much more difficult to take a selfie or hang over the edge.
  • the edges are outfitted with black arrows, giving the cyclists a small optical illusion that the course is narrowing and that they should steer inwards, staying away from the edges (…hopefully that works as the company hopes)
  • they can be filled with water to make them heavier in windy environments

The Netherlands has also temporarily stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine for two weeks while the European Medical Agency reviews the vaccine’s safety: Netherlands suspends use of AstraZeneca Covid vaccine amid blood clot investigation from nltimes.nl. 200,000 appointments in the next few weeks have been cancelled. Hopefully they will be rescheduled once use of the vaccine is cleared.

Haagse ‘Verkiezingskrant’ met stemlocaties en kandidaten niet overal bezorgd from omroepwest.nl (The Hague’s ‘Election Newspaper’ with polling places and a candidate list not delivered everywhere). This year The Hague’s government decided to include the information in a special newspaper rather than with the voting pass you receive in the mail. However some neighborhoods didn’t get one. Marco and I didn’t. Luckily the information is also available online for those who are digitally savvy, so it’s more a pain for those who are not.

And one final, very random article: Wurst case: Burglar caught over bite from German’s sausage. Including another worst/wurst pun…

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Demonstrations in The Hague (Or: Malieveld and Koekamp)

Posted on March 14, 2021 by Niki

Today there were two separate but simultaneous demonstrations at the Malieveld: a demonstration against the government’s corona measures (at Malieveld) and a demonstration for climate action (at the nearby Koekamp).

The maximum number of demonstrators for the Malieveld is 200 (and it used to be 100), a number that was quickly reached more than an hour before the scheduled 14:00 start time. When the police tried to prevent additional demonstrators from entering Malieveld, the demonstrators simply started marching through the city centre, including towards Plein 1813 (Dutch Wikipedia) on the northern side of the city centre. After that the police turned a blind eye to demonstrators joining the demonstration at Malieveld, for a time. By 15:30, the police said the demonstrators needed to leave immediately. Around 15:45 the police started clearing Malieveld by force, using mounted officers and water cannons.

Earlier in the afternoon all incoming trains to The Hague were (briefly) cancelled, which meant that you could only leave The Hague, not enter it. The train service has since resumed, however. The Hague’s tram and bus service is also slightly disrupted, with four trams (9, 15, 16 and 17) and one bus (20) running alternative routes at the moment. That is to be expected, though, since so many people are criss-crossing the tracks and roads around Malieveld.

The local website Regio15.nl has a three hour video (on YouTube, 3 hours long). They also have pictures taken throughout the afternoon of the situation. Just another day for Malieveld though – there have been a number of anti-corona demonstrations in the last year.

I think there was a fair amount of food behind, since the Malieveld is currently residence to about 20-30 seagulls. Hmm.

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Rabbijn Maarsenplein (Or: The Amalek monument)

Posted on March 13, 2021 by Niki

Rabbijn Maarsenplein is a neighborhood in The Hague’s city centre which used to be well-known for its Jewish population before World War II. Most Jews did not survive. A few years back the Jewish Monument Foundation moved the 1967 memorial to this location, giving it a more prominent space. It depicts a family seeking protection, with a Holocaust victim at their feet. I have posted about this memorial a few times. The name “Amalek” comes from the biblical verse from the book of Deuteronomy: Remember what Amalek did to you… don’t forget, with Amalek representing the enemy of the Jews.

There are usually flowers at the base of this memorial, but this time the careful placement of a single white rose caught my eye:

And a photo from the front:

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