Scheveningen

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!

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Hallo

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).

Widsets

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.

Flock

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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