The interruption after resumption of this blog is mostly due to my temporary relocation to Den Haag (The Hague; 's-Gravenhage). I will not talk about the reasons (apart from saying that I am here for an internship); I will share some funny facts about the Dutch and the Netherlands instead.

So.

I am a proud owner of two different bank cards. One of them is Visa and the other is MasterCard. Neither is accepted in the shops here - they insist on me using Maestro or some weird Dutch Giro card. Like I had one!

There is a beach here in The Hague. The sea looks very cold and also somewhat dirty (...sandy beach with a very long difference between high tide and low tide), but nevertheless there are people bathing, surfing, and sailing. Which looks cool.

There is not a single free public toilet on the beach. Which in my opinion is a shame.

But there are kites on the beach. Well, kites. Some of them are absolutely huge, and look incrdible in the air.

There's also a pier on the beach. And dunes. And a harbour. And if you walk a bit away, fish handling facilities. The Dutch word for fish? Vis. You can see it everywhere there.

I have seen Meisje met de parel aka The girl with the pearl earring. Btw, this is one of my favourite paintings! If you take a closer look at the painting, you can see that a) she looks like she had no teeth, b) the pearl actually looks quite metallic, and not like a pearl at all, c) she has white dots in her eyes which project above the plane of the drawing (if you know what I mean), and this makes it look not like a masterpiece, but like a cheeky thing. :)

There's a cat somewhere close to the place I stay, because it makes catty sounds. :)

The trams in the Hague are, erm, funny. When it rains, they are late. When anything else happens, they are late. They are just generally late, and that's that.

You can get an anonymous OV-chipkaart for riding the trams (and also trains in the whole country, which I consider quite clever). The tram tariff in the Hague works like this: you pay some boarding fee (...about 0.90 eur), and then something like 15 cents per km. If you change quickly enough, you don't pay the boarding fee twice. I find this ridiculously complex, and I only wonder how come that the British are not doing this. (Because the British love things which are insanely complex.)

I am killing my congitive bias here. There is a Polish shop nearby. I know the Dutch beers, so I decided to try the Polish ones. Before, I was reluctant to try, because I was a bit like, meh, Polish beer is no good compared to Pilsner Urquell. But now I've tried and I quite like it. :) My fav Polish beer so far is Perla chmielowa (orhowdoyouspellit).

I don't sleep very well here, probably because I am learning awful lot every day.

I actually do some pretty good aikido here, with a friend of mine who is a total kick-ass. I like her classes very much. :) Do you know these muay-thai, kick box, wing chun etc. guys who claim that aikido is not a real martial art because it's soft and fake and stuff? I would like them to practice with this lady. I am sure she would kick their ass 1000%.

They do good cheese here. Also, the French cheese tastes better here than across the Channel. A fiver to the person who tells me why!

The water pressure is not great. It's even worse than in Manchester (and that's something)!

There are killer stairs in my place. They are ladder-like, and they have no railings on the 'open side' (the one away from wall - where you can actually fall down). Health & safety, people!

Few shops accept Visa or MasterCard, they all want to see Maestro. OMG facepalm. :) Obviously, if you want to reload your OV chipkaart, you also need Maestro - meaning that the only place I can recharge is Den Haag Centraal. I tried elsewhere, but it ended up with me having to persuade a receptionist to pay for me with her card, and me giving her cash. O_o

Who invented this language, I don't know. It looks kinda Germanic but not quite, and it's just very funny. And it sounds even funnier than it looks!

The Hague is a nice city (especially on the second sight). However, for a Londoner, it looks like post-zombie-apocalypse. After ca 10 pm, there's nobody on the streets. Nobody. Nobody.

There is this place, Scheveningen, which is said to be a 'test city'. During the war, the Dutch were able to tell who's German based on how they pronounced the name of this place. If they pronounced the German 'Sch' (instead of 'sk'), they were clearly Germans, even if they pretended to be Dutch. Very handy if you have spies everywhere!

It is said that in Holland, nobody uses curtains. Well, ok, they don't, but they use these stickers on their windows which make the windows only translucent, not transparent. They probably call it privacy, but I call it cheating.

Bikes. Bikes everywhere. What's more Dutch? :) :)