Digital Home of Kristoffer Strom

Wednesday 08th of September 2010

Round 14 - The Hague, Holland (2004-05-24 -> 2004-06-03)

My very last trip working for the state department was to Hague in Holland. I had no idea what to expect, no clue at all. The only thing I knew was that we for some reason had to fly to Amsterdam and take a train to get to Hague which seemed weird to me. So after a short little flight we managed to find the trains (which wasn't very easy actually) to Hague and when we got there we took a taxi to the embassy and the hotel.

The hotel (Dorint) was a pretty posh place right next to a convention center. Fortunately for us there was no convention at the time. When we checked in we got some golden bages. It said "show this badge in the bar for free drinks". And I'm like "one drink, or one drink per person or what?"... nope, all free drinks. It turns out the embassy had booked the VIP suites and these badges came with the room. I've heard Holland is liberal, but free bar for 2 weeks was a bit much I thought. We tried it out for a few beers the first night, nothing major.
I got going with the work as soon as I could and the only poblem I had there was fixing a database that we needed to convert, thanks to a failure in communication they had no idea we needed to take it offline very early so that was pretty tight. But other than that the work proceeded right on time.

There were absolutely no lunch restaurants around there. None what so ever, not even a bad one. But there were plenty of stores so I ended up buying sallads and stuff, pretty healthy food when there is no McDonalds around. We did get treated to a very nice fish restaurant though. I'm really not a big fan of fish but that was pretty sweet.

Very early on we found an argentinian restaurant down by the harbor and I really got hooked on it since I loved their steaks! We ended up going there four times I think. But what I remember best was that we found a good spanish tapas restaurant that had just about any kind of tapas you'd like. And they were good at it. Awesomely good!

For the saturday we went down to Delfi, legendary for it's porcelain and "old town" feeling and it was so worth it. So relaxing going around the small markets looking at stuff and we ended up at a restaurant specializing in pancakes. Naturually we couldn't take just anything they had on the menu so we ordered a special mix and damn it was good. All along drinking the nice beer. Then we got back to the hotel and since it was the weekend we decided to try out the badges for the bar and ... well, everything was actually free. Everything from the beer to the very expensive whisky. As the bartender said... "it's your headache" and it really was.

For the sunday we walked around the town and ended up at the Mesdag museum. They have a huge panoramic painting of what Hague looked like 125 years ago, fully 360 degrees spanning 120 meters. Quite an impressive artpiece, highly recommended to go there. And then ofcourse the weekend ended in a F1 race as always.

Like the year before I managed to be out of the country for my birthday, but yet again the people I was with managed to find out and they bought me a 4 pack of red bull and 1 kilo of chili peanuts. I really felt appreciated at that point.

When it was time for me to go home I asked at the hotel how much a taxi to the airport would cost since I didn't feel like taking the train and stuff again and as it turned out the hotel had a deal with a taxi company and the price was actually lower than the price of a taxi to the trainstation and train to the airport! Don't know why the people at the embassy didn't tell us about that, if they even knew about it. And once I got the airport I had done a small little mistake and forgot some of my tools in my carry-on bag and ofcourse it beeped ALOT and I had to throw it away. That was the second time that happened.

When I got back to Stockholm I took the normal bus to the parking lot and when getting off the bus I stepped on a bit of rock there and twisted my ankle so bad. It didn't feel that bad at first, I got into the car and started driving home but before the first McDonalds (and everyone driving from Arlanda knows how close that is!) I almost lost consciousness so I did the only responsible thing - took the exit and parked at McDonalds and waited for my body to adjust to whatever had happened. Then I drove home and my ankle was big as hell but I kept it iced all the time but it didn't get better. As a precaution I went to the hospital (that's the 4th time in two years if you're counting) to have it checked up. And yeap, it was sprained. So I got some bandage on it and two crotches and 2 weeks off work. Fortunately this was my last trip so that didn't cause any problems but after every trip I went in for debriefing and they laughed pretty hard at me since I was the one that had all the bad luck all the time - but always pulled through in the end.

Overall I had a very good time in Hague. It was a surprisingly calm, laid back city for being a capital. Noone seemed to be in a hurry to get anywhere. Another thing I noticed is how low everything was, they really didn't build anything higher than 4 levels there (except the hotel). Food was good even though the only time we even got close to dutch food was pancakes. But it was kinda sad that it was the last trip.

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