Marco was kind enough to take a few pictures for me this week. He found some more graffiti. This time in the Achterom, a small side street which cuts through the Passage shopping area.
And this one:
Yarn is definitely a theme in this graffiti. And check out the ice in the next photo:
There’s also a white cat above the string of yarn, balancing precariously on his bike. Cute, right?
Happy Friday, everyone.
I noticed a “We miss you” sign at Hema (English Wikipedia) recently and decided to snap a quick picture:
Non-essential stores are still closed in the Netherlands, although click-and-collect options will be available from 10 February (see my previous blog post).
In other news, for those of us in The Hague: the yearly sculpture event will be returning to the Lange Voorhout this summer! (Official link from pulchri.nl in Dutch). The exhibition will run from 21 May to 14 September and will feature sculptures from 20 artists. The event is free and open to the public at any point of the day (provided there isn’t an evening curfew… ugh).
In 2018 (blog post) and 2019 the event was sand sculptures. Unfortunately the 2020 event was cancelled due to the corona crisis, so it is nice to see it return this year.
Check out this beautiful graffiti in the Raamstraat by the Bristol store and by the Rootz restaurant:
The first thing I noticed was the blue wings of the bird, but the face at the top is just as stunning honestly. It never stops amazing me how graffiti (and poetry) just randomly appears in this city. Here’s some owl graffiti Marco and I found last year and here is a corona-related poem that appeared in the same area as Bristol last year.
This morning also saw a milestone in the Netherlands: First person in the Netherlands vaccinated against Covid-19 at 8:43 a.m. from nltimes.nl. The recipient was a 39-year old nursing home worker who works in Veghel, a town in the southern part of the Netherlands. Veghel was also where the first registered case of coronavirus was found last year, so the choice of where to administer the first vaccination is also symbolic.
I was able to get a few photos of the Mauritshuis museum during a short walk this week. What do you think of the Christmas tree?
Mauritshuis is most known for Vermeer’s The Girl with a Pearl Earring. You can see a homage to this behind the right pillar in the image – but it is not exactly the painting, either. It is a digital display where the head and outfit change slightly every few seconds.
As you can see above, now the photo is of someone else with a blue cap instead of a headscarf.
You can also visit the museum virtually via this link (it is like Google Map’s Street View).
And a fun bit of news, an article from indebuurt.nl about the many face masks The Hague’s new mayor wears: De vele verschillende mondkapjes van de Haagse burgemeester Jan van Zanen.
Page 1: a face mask with The Hague’s yellow and green colors. Page 2: a face mask with a The Girl with a Pearl Earring design. Page 3: a face mask from Museon, a science and culture museum in The Hague. Page 4: a face mask from HTM, The Hague’s public transportation company. Page 5: a face mask from a local soccer club. Page 6: a face mask with a depiction of Haagse Harry. Page 7: no idea, really.
Have you read about this one yet? I have never seen something so cool (which I only feel comfortable saying because no one was injured):
This happened late on Sunday night into Monday, just after midnight. The metro went straight through the stop blocks at the final stop, crashing off the platform, landing on a whale’s tail. (Don’t believe the rumor that the artwork is called “Saved by the Whale’s Tail”, as cool as that would be. The actual name is “Whale tails”.) The artwork was installed in 2002 and is a reference to the metro’s tail track.
I give the dismount a perfect 10. More news articles:
Subway crashes through stop block; Hangs precariously off artwork 10-meters up from nltimes.nl
Whale tail sculpture stops Rotterdam metro train from crashing into water from dutchnews.nl
Verbazing bij kunstenaar na metro-ongeluk: ‘Gedacht dat het zou instorten’ from nos.nl (Surprise by artist after metro accident: ‘I thought it would collapse’). The construction is reinforced polyester, so I can see why he would think that!
The artist also says in this article that he wanted to go a different direction, however he decided to stick with the whale tail because residents in the area reminded him that he had promised them a whale tail (or two).
And because of that the driver is still alive today.
Today’s picture is of art on the side of a small restaurant:
Chapeau is the word for hat in French. Hat’s off! (petje eraf in Dutch)
Interestingly this artwork is on the side of a restaurant which sells Italian pizza and Turkish food like shoarma. Not French food.
Looking for your feel good article of the day? I really enjoyed this article from The Guardian: Taiwan grandparents go viral on Instagram modelling abandoned clothes. It’s exactly as it sounds. It’s the perfect article to forget about the rest of the craziness going on these days.
Today’s photo comes from the Korte Koediefstraat, or Short Cow thief street. No joke. I posted about the nearby Koediefstraat a few weeks back, if you want to read about why the street is called that.
In other news:
Last week Marco and I noticed another poem hanging on the wall of one of the buildings in the city centre:
It’s also on the Grote Markt, across the street from MediaMarkt at the Lust poffertjes restaurant (Instagram | Facebook). In English it reads:
A while ago there was war and occupation here
Even so peace, freedom and joy returned
The sun always came back from behind the clouds
Every time
This will happen again now, we don’t know when
but it will happen for sure
We live in the now
With the joy from before
And the hope for tomorrow
The sun will come again
The Hague,
Annette, 90 years
I blogged about a previous poem at the same location last month.
Here is another random piece of art which I spotted at the end of a side street in The Hague:
And of course since it is the Netherlands you get to see a lot of bikes on each side of the alleyway. This is Bagijnestraat, a small side street off of the popular Lange Poten street, which includes stores, cafés and even the Tweede Kamer (House of Representatives).
I’ve always wanted to write a blog post about this street!
Every time I walk past this street I have to laugh, but it seems so silly. The name of the street is Koediefstraat, which translates to Cow thief street. Hahaha. I’ll admit I had images of someone dragging an unwilling cow down this street while being chased by an unhappy army of Dutchies wielding pitchforks. But alas, the reason is a bit different.
If you go to the Haags Gemeentearchief website (The Hague city archive) and search for Koediefstraat, you’ll get two results for from the Straatnamencollectie, or the street name collection. The street had a few different names in the last 500+ years. One was Kromme Poten or Crooked legs but I’m not sure why. It was also named Wijnstraat or Wine street for a while due to the winery in the area. Another name was Burenstraat which was a reference to someone living in the area in the 1650s: Jacob van Buuren.
But the current name, Koediefstraat is likely a reference to Adriaan Janszoon Colijn whose nickname was Coedyff, which had a similar pronunciation to Koedief.
Also interesting to note: the painting on the side of the wall appeared recently; I don’t remember seeing it before. It caught my eye and reminded me that I wanted to do a blog post over the street name. There was no trace of it on Google Maps, whose most recent image was from June 2018.
Life in the Hague 