Leaves of yellow and green (Or: Megastores)

Posted on July 11, 2020 by Niki

This morning Marco and I walked over to Megastores and a few stores in the surrounding area to do some Saturday shopping.

Megastores has always been an interesting mall. Most of the stores are furniture related, with some additional everyday stores like Hema, Blokker, Big Bazar and Xenos. They have had issues with unoccupied stores throughout the years, although we didn’t see as many this time. However in general it is the same issue American malls have: walk down the “wrong” wing and you will find yourself in a ghost town.

In other news:

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Painted on the street (Or: Social distancing messages)

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Niki

More and more “keep your distance” messages have appeared on the streets of The Hague in the last month. This one is on the Grote Markt:

I do like the coat of arms (Wikipedia) in the upper left.

Let’s go for a few random YouTube videos today. It’s Friday, and the headlines are depressing!

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Temptation at the checkout lane (Or: It’s not quite like the US)

Posted on July 9, 2020 by Niki

In the last year Albert Heijn started adding candy and other snacks to the area by the self-service registers. It’s not very tempting though, probably because they don’t have that much room to show off the “goods”:

So, five choices generally. And they aren’t well-stocked and they don’t look that appealing visually. At least try to get the barcodes looking a bit more similar, please? Although I suppose there will come a day when I desperately need that extra purchase to get me over ten euros to get a stamp. If you get 10 or 20 of those you can usually get something good (if the promotion is right).

In other news:

  • I don’t know if you remember the train derailment in The Hague at the start of the year, but the report of what went wrong was released earlier this week (omroepwest.nl). The type of train that derailed is often used in routes which require hard and frequent braking, however the maintenance schedule for this train type did not take this into account. The train’s brakes were worn, causing two wheels to completely derail and damage to a few dozen meters of track. A conductor and passenger were both injured, but not seriously.
  • Did you know that the Show/hide formatting marks button in MS Word has the nickname onderwater tekens or onderwaterscherm in Dutch? I mean the button which shows you carriage returns or non-breaking spaces. In English that translates to “underwater marks” or “underwater screen”. In other words: looking under water to see what you normally can’t see. Hmm. It’s not the formal name, of course.
  • Great, now I am thinking of the MS Word paperclip. “Clippy” was his name (theverge.com).
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Anniversary year (Or: 150 years of Bijenkorf)

Posted on July 8, 2020 by Niki

Bijenkorf is a Dutch department store which opened its first store in Amsterdam in 1870. 150 years ago! To celebrate this, they scheduled a year of celebrations in 2020 (thehagueonline.com). For example, there are unique shop windows (Bijenkorf always has beautiful holiday windows), unique merchandise to buy, guided tours, events to attend…

The only problem – which you can see coming with the date of March 10, 2020 in the article from thehagueonline.com – is the corona crisis rearing its ugly head. The carefully scheduled events and tours now read tijdelijk niet beschikbaar or temporarily not available.

In other news:

  • The Dutch corona app will be called CoronaMelder (nltimes.nl) and will use Bluetooth. CoronaMelder translates to Corona Reporter.
  • Kuikentjes bevrijd op de Oude Trambaan from regio15.nl – baby chicks fell through a pedestrian bridge and couldn’t get out on their own. They were ultimately freed by firemen who removed a few of the bridge planks to reach the chicks.
  • The Guardian has a very interesting article called ‘Landscape of fear’: what a mass of rotting reindeer carcasses taught scientists although that topic admittedly isn’t for everyone. But there’s an informative tie-in with the Dutch Oostvaardersplassen nature reserve (where thousands of animals ended up starving due to a lack of predators in the area) and the ultimate changes to the ecosystem which occurred because of the abandoned carcasses. This caused a great amount of controversy in The Netherlands because it was a conscious choice not to feed the animals to help them survive the winter.
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Food halls (Or: Haagse Bluf in The Hague)

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Niki

Food halls have only recently become a “thing” in The Netherlands, lets say the last five years. A few examples I have been to include the Markthal in Rotterdam and MingleMush in The Hague. Apparently MingleMush re-opened today! I’ll have to schedule a (safe) visit, as it has been too long… It looks like they are open Tuesday through Saturday, 12:00-21:00.

Another food hall Marco and I still need to visit is the food hall in the Haagse Bluf, an upscale shopping area in the centre of The Hague:

It’s a great place to walk through, with very photogenic areas. Just click the tag “Haagse Bluf” at the bottom of this post to see more. My favorite photo was of the red scooter, but the photo of the iced chai tea at the end of this post serves as a great memory for me. We only had it a few times before Kaldi stopped selling it. It was delicious!

In other news:

  • It’s official: Amsterdam to London direct train without Brussels stopover now ready from nltimes.nl. Now it only takes 3 1/2 hours to get into London by train (from Rotterdam)! Considering how long you’re waiting around in an airport, that’s pretty good.
  • The Netherlands now reports deaths and hospital intakes on a weekly basis on Tuesdays. RIVM reported 19 Covid-19 deaths and 9 hospitalizations in the last week (from nltimes.nl), although due to delayed reporting not all of those were in the last week. They can say that 5 deaths occurred between June 28 and July 5, and two of the hospital admissions occurred after June 30. There were also 432 positive cases reported.
  • ICU intakes are (for the moment) still reported every day at lcps.nu. There are currently 24 Covid-19 patients in the ICU, with a low of 18 last week.
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The taste of durian (Or: Spotted at the local Asian store)

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Niki

The inspiration for this blog post: last month I mentioned a news article from The Guardian about a durian fruit causing the evacuation of a German post office. Apparently it is a very divisive fruit. You know how I know that? I wanted to check my spelling of “divisive” so I typed in “divisive fruit” into Google, and durian was the top result. Hmm.

Are you in the camp that thinks it tastes like rotten eggs or gym socks? Or do you find it tastes of almonds, a bit creamy? (If you have ever had it, that is. Apparently it can be hard to find if you’re not in Asia.)

I didn’t realize it might be at the local Asian store until I saw sweets on the shelves:

That doesn’t look too bad, does it? Or these cakes:

But the fruit itself is indeed available at the local Asian store, as long as you are willing to try the deep freeze version. (I know, deep freeze is never as good as fresh.) Amusingly the page only describes it as having a “pungent odor”, which sounds… more bearable than it probably is in reality. Or you have another version which might be easy to break open.

I’m not sure I’m up for buying the deep freeze versions to start with, but maybe I can purchase a snack or two first and see how it goes…

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Coconut cookies and books (Or: A visit to Lebkov)

Posted on July 5, 2020 by Niki

This afternoon I spent a few hours at Lebkov in The Hague, something I hadn’t done for a while. I have had takeout coffee from Lebkov over the last few months but this was one my first time sitting down. Well, there was one exception: I did meet a coworker there shortly after the rules were relaxed to allow customers to dine-in again. It was strange. We did not stay that long.

I purchased a coconut cookie, which was tasty, soft and slightly sticky on the inside. I also brought a book along, Night Train to Lisbon, although I ended up fiddling with Affinity Designer on my tablet instead. While I just started the novel last week I am enjoying it. It’s a bit dense (in a good way) so I’m glad I am reading the English translation and not the Dutch one. These days my reading habits seem to be me alternating Dutch and English with every book, which is fine.

In other news:

  • The Amsterdam zoo posted a video on YouTube of their newest baby elephant enjoying its first bath.
  • Would you like to see a pink limousine stuck on a Delft canal bridge? Then check out this Reddit thread.(And really. Who wouldn’t want to see that?)
  • You can also follow the Twitter account of Winston bureaukat (@Winston_topkat) for adorable photos of a local police station’s cat.
(“Look at me being so cute! You’ll just need to overlook the fact that I’ve destroyed half the station!”)
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Always watching (Or: Johan de Witt in the rain)

Posted on July 4, 2020 by Niki

My plan of getting good photos this weekend for the blog has been temporarily halted by one very rainy Saturday. Boo!

But I did get a picture of the Johan de Witt statue:

That is a carefully cropped photo to try and hide any construction that was going on in the background. But otherwise, yeah, it was not pleasant weather at all.

In other news:

Here’s hoping Sunday has some sun in store for us!

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Invasion of the farmers (Or: Part 2)

Posted on July 3, 2020 by Niki

Okay – it wasn’t exactly an invasion. Not like last time anyway, when farmers in trackers stormed the Malieveld and destroyed the grass. More like a small skirmish. The Dutch government has stated that if cows are fed cattle feed that is less protein rich there will be less nitrogen released which will allow the construction sector to build new homes (aka one sector makes less nitrogen pollution to allow another sector to keep polluting).

The farmers were understandably less than thrilled about that plan so they drove their tractors to The Hague to protest outside of the Binnenhof during yesterday’s vote. In the end the vote was delayed until 01:30 early Friday morning, and then delayed again to 03:30. See also Central The Hague sealed off to angry farmers as MPs vote to cut protein in animal feed from dutchnews.nl.

The government ultimately decided to go ahead with the plan to reduce protein in the cattle feed. In an attempt to prevent the chaos that happened last October, the military was called in to block off certain streets so that tractors wouldn’t disrupt the city too much today.

I decided to take a quick walk over to the Malieveld this afternoon to see what was going on. The only thing I found was a van from the national public television company (NOS) waiting for something newsworthy to happen. But by this point all of the farmers were gone, so they were just standing around. Poor NOS reporters!

If you are interested in more photos check out the article Boeren protesteren tegen de voermaatregel from regio15.nl (Farmers protest against the feed measure).

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Canals and bikes (Or: Outside the gardens)

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Niki

You know what you find a lot of in The Hague? Canals. (Okay, less than you used to.)

And what else? Bikes. (THAT one is probably growing exponentially!)

The rule in The Netherlands is: if it fits, I sits. (Oh wait, that rule is for cats.) But if it fits, bikes will be placed!

For a lighter news article, let’s try Child-interrupted TV broadcasts ‘show reality for working parents’ from theguardian.com. I think it’s cute, and glad that people see it happen. It is definitely a reality a lot of workers face these days!

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