I’m currently staying in a hotel in an area of The Hague called Scheveningen. It’s a very nice, splendid beach resort on the North Sea coast of the city. Very tourist heavy, as given away by the abundance of hotels - apparently the area attracts many German tourists on their summer break.

Scheveningen is quite a tricky word to pronounce correctly - there’s nothing quite like it in the English language, because the ‘Sch’ at the start requires a sort of choking. It is widely known that the town name was used as a shibboleth in World War II to identify German spies. German speakers pronounce the Sch differently from the Dutch, so were easy to identify.

For the record, it seems that English speakers also have trouble with it

Hopefully when I move to a flat next week I’ll still be close to this lovely seaside area. it’s definitely worth walking along the beach in the evenings, although for a non-native the sight of an open air urinal in the middle of the street was a bit of a suprise.

I had a few problems putting pictures on my phone onto the Internet earlier, including one of the pier, but should have this sorted soon. Can’t wait to get a proper camera over here and to go exploring!

technorati tags:netherlands, hauge, scheveningen

Hello from the Netherlands! First few days were great, although unbelieveably hot - something like 32 degrees C here. Wearing a suit in this weather is not advised!

I will post more soon - at the moment I’m on a wifi connection in the hotel restaurant with limited battery. In a few day’s time I’m hoping to get a flat with a more permenant connection, so stay tuned.

The new work is great. A nice mixture of friendly, helpful people from all over Europe.

Thanks for all your comments and emails - I promise I’ll post more soon, including photos (although my cameraphone’s a bit rubbish, and I won’t be back in the UK for a few weeks to pick up the camera).

It’s all change at the moment. Basically I’ve taken up a new job in the Netherlands and am currently sat in the lounge at Eurostar waiting for the train to Brussels (then on to The Hague).

Whether I’ll have regular Internet access for the first couple of weeks has yet to be seen, but I’m hoping to be able to post here a bit more frequently, particularly since where international phone bills are so expensive friends and family will come here for updates.

The change came about because I was looking for a bit of a refresh and change in my life. An offer came that sounded good, and here I am - it was remarkably good timing.

I’m also looking forward to the possibilities of travelling around Europe - having a well-connected base on the continent should give me the chance to travel to different countries in Europe over the next six months (the length of my contract). My daft (?) ambition is to get to every major western European country at least once before Christmas.

I’ll be looking to return to the UK quite frequently, partly to keep up with paperwork and affairs back home, but mainly to see friends and loved ones. I’m hoping to be able to sort out airport travel soon; it was too expensive to travel by plane at such short notice.

Anyway, more soon (I promise!)

Here’s an interesting little article from Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_railway_station

Apparently there is/was a station in London opened in 1854 specifically for transporting coffins and mourners to the crematorium.

Widsets is a nice little applet from Nokia. As the name (rather unsubtlely) suggests, it’s a set of widgets which you can customise with things like your favourite RSS feeds, weather, sports results and other little gems.

Although developed by Nokia, the system is built upon Java so enjoys a wide-ranging support. It works fine on my Sony Ericsson v600i.

The bandwidth utilisation is minimal, and the presentation is great. It’s well worth a visit.

Been using Flock for about a month now. It’s very good; highly recommended. The browser is built on Firefox and comes with a decent RSS reader, Flickr & PhotoBucket support built-in and blogging capability (from where I’m writing this).

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