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