First, here is a photo of a statue on the side of the building. I know it is somewhere in the city centre, and somewhere in the Chinatown part of the city, but I can’t quite make out the street name on the photo. Nevertheless, it is an interesting piece of art:
And here is a fountain near the main entrance of Vondelpark:
Unfortunately this weekend trip we took already feels like it was a few months ago, even though it was only last month. Oh well – on to the next trip!
Here is another photo of flowers for you, randomly placed at the feet of a statue in The Hague. Who knows why? These are quite beautiful flowers, though.
I’m partially posting this article because I like the title: The gym before breakfast on a cafe terrace: What changes today from dutchnews.nl. Today is the first day of step 2 in the government’s plan to reopen society. Some gyms opened at 00:01 this morning, and cafés are now allowed to open from 06:00. So the title makes sense.
And here is some good news for the Netherlands: Corona patient numbers down by nearly 150, cases drop 25% in a week, also from dutchnews.nl. The last time we had such a large drop in patient numbers was January 1. That feels like a lifetime ago.
The Netherlands has a long way to go in comparison to other European countries. However we are getting there, helped in part by the vaccination program speeding up (we are closing in on 150,000 vaccines given each day).
The Thorbecke monument on the Lange Voorhout has recently received a new addition:
Interesting that only one of them is wearing a face mask…
This monument is actually made up of two parts: the modern stainless steel part (pictured above) and a marble part (not pictured) where J.R. Thorbecke, a 19th century Dutch statesman is actually shown. The two parts are supposed to represent the 19th century Thorbecke’s influence on our times. See also this page from angloinfo.com for more information in English.
In other news – what does the main train provider (NS) do when storks (a protected species in the Netherlands) build their nest above the train tracks? Answer: not much once the eggs are laid. Ooievaarsnest op bovenleidingportaal vormt brandgevaar, maar mag niet weggehaald worden from omroepwest.nl in Dutch. The same thing happened in 2020 in a different part of the Netherlands (article from dutchnews.nl in English).
As usually happens these days, the Netherlands broke another record today with the warmest 21 February ever (article from omroepwest.nl in Dutch). The previous record was 14.8C (59F), although temperatures are expected to rise to 16-17C (60-62F) today.
I took a walk this morning around the city centre, stopping to take a photo of the Plein and the statue of Willem van Oranje:
There were plenty of places to soak in some sun today. You can check out the boulevard webcam at scheveningenlive.nl. Fairly busy, both in terms of pedestrians and traffic.
In other news: Investigation started as cargo plane showers metal parts on Limburg village from dutchnews.nl. (Coincdentally I read a similar thing happened in Denver, with a passenger plane.)
Also omroepwest.nl (Dutch website) has a handful of photos of places covered in ice a few weeks back and the same places after the ice melted.
Today’s photo is of the Muzentoren in The Hague, about a five minute walk from The Hague’s Centraal Station. Muzentoren translates roughly to “Muses’ Tower”. It’s a relatively new building, made in 2001 according to the Dutch Wikipedia page.
The statue in front also has an interesting meaning, although my photo only shows half of it. It is called “Light and darkness”. The side you see is the light – standing up straight, looking straight ahead. On the other side is darkness (see this image from indebuurt.nl) where the other half sags down, looking dejected.
In other news… did you know it was a year ago yesterday that the Netherlands broke the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded? A city in the south of the Netherlands reached 40.7C or 105F. Yikes! Yesterday the average was around 17C or 63F. That’s a bit of a difference…
I still remember La Salle, a local French restaurant, putting out free water for anyone (including pets) that week.
Today’s photo is of the Willem II statue by the Buitenhof:
There’s some interesting tidbits with this statue.
As expected, the weekly coronavirus numbers from the RIVM were a bit high: about twice as many cases as last week (987 compared to 534), 19 hospitalizations and 7 deaths. But not all of those were numbers from the past 7 days, at least.
Outside of that, it’s mainly keeping on top of work during the day and relaxing at night. But the work days do go by quick, at least!
The weather today is just as good as predicted! Lots of sun, lots of warmth. I decided to take a photo of the Haagse Harry statue over by the Grote Markt plaza:
We don’t have any big plans this weekend, which has been great after a long week of work. In addition to enjoying some sun earlier I also played around with Affinity Designer a bit this morning, working on some isometric designs.
I’m also in the middle of reading My Year of Rest and Relaxation in Dutch but I have to admit some of the humor is either too dark or gross for me. Not enough to stop reading, but definitely enough to ask myself “What the heck?” sometimes.
In other news:
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!
Last night Marco and I went for a walk, a bit later in the evening around 20:00. While the weather was turning cooler it was still a nice walk through a fairly peaceful city centre. Actually, when we walked through the (deserted) Binnenhof what I noticed the most was the silence – not even the birds were chirping.
One thing we noticed was a face mask on the statue of “Jantje” or “Little John”:
Jantje was a boy who died at the age of 15… in the year 1299. He’s part of a Dutch children’s song about The Hague. If you ask him where his father lives, he’ll point with his finger to the Binnenhof, as his father’s estate used to reside in the space where the Binnenhof now stands.
Marco remarked on the dislocation of the finger – most likely a lot of people touch it due to the song.
And here is a bonus picture taken by Marco:
That’s a great angle, if I say so myself.
This photo was taken last weekend while Marco and I were visiting Scheveningen with a few friends. It shows the outdoor portion of Museum Beelden aan Zee, with an oversized statue eating herring. That is a well-known tradition in these parts called “Hollandse Nieuwe” where people look forward to the traditional start date of the herring season.
Of course, if you look really closely you can see that his feet are stomping on much smaller statues, but okay… we’ll ignore that.
After the usual visit to the statues part we headed down to the beach, even getting our feet wet (and in my case gingerly stepping over seashells). The sea water was a bit cold, but we got used to it after a while. Most interesting were the little ponds that were left behind further inland from the tides – a lot of kids were playing in those as they were only an inch or two deep. I don’t have any pictures of those, since I figured with my luck I’d try to take a picture and just end up dropping my telephone into the water… haha.
In the other Scheveningen new, the annual fireworks festival won’t be coming back this year. Why is that you ask? It’s actually too popular! No, seriously – the event was attracting around 400,000 people for four days total (across two weekends) and the beach just wasn’t large enough to support that. Most of the problems came after the event ended, since everyone wanted to go home at the same time.
This DHC article from last year has a great overhead photo showing you just how crowded it was trying to get home with public transportation after the event ended. Although HTM (the public transportation company) did say the buses were not riding at that moment and were being used as a buffer to prevent people from climbing over the fences leading to the stop. You can see the road is clear where the buses would actually be driving. There’s a security guy in yellow standing in the road to keep everyone off it. Additionally, HTM had 71 tram rides that night instead of the normal 31, and 54 bus rides as opposed to the normal 15. Still, the wait for some folks was over 90 minutes even with that extra capacity.
I do hope they can figure something out for next year though. The fireworks festival was a lot of fun, if too crowded for me in the end.
Life in the Hague 