The city, and her air, surrounds me. In den Haag the sea wind hits you as it want. It might be hard and on your face, or it could be the surprise from the other side you thought. It might be the breeze that comes with the spring tide, or the violence that announces a North Sea storm. It is always the unpredictable sea, besides a seagull that is soaring, also always. In Nijmegen you know, right away, that there is no sea. The water in the air is the water that the Waal carries from the Alps onto the North Sea. Is not unpredictable, but it carries the wisdom of the mountains and hills that has crossed. Rotterdam is the sea, again, but a different one. Rotterdam is not the local North Sea, but is the seven seas from afar, the air of Rotterdam tells you of people that is changing, that is moving, that came from elsewhere, that is bruising their shoulders with each other to open spaces that has to be created, every time again. Amsterdam is almost, almost drowned in the dreams that so many travellers have left in her channels. The true Amsterdammers are a rough bunch, pragmatic and down to earth, possibly to be able to live in a place where so many promises have been broken.
With the unpredictability of her seawind, I did not expect the hard borders of Den Haag. I had dreamed of a city mixed and mixed again, as many sea cities are, shaped by whatever might show up the next time their fleet is back in the haven. But I have got to believe that the haven, the haven of Scheveningen, is not the haven of Den Haag, not really. Around Scheveningen there are the destitute and the settled, the tourists and the local surfers, the racist hooligan and the Ghanian crew member that jumped ship here (from all places), the fishers and the traders all, all of them, mixed and tumbling into each other. Scheveningen is her haven and the mix that havens bring.
Not Den Haag.
So I get out of the train and walk to the tramway to enter it. Or I wait at the platform. I look around. The young dutch people dressed with what they think is sharpness are not here. They came with me in the train, but now they are walking to their ministries and NGO’s, to give what they think is sharp advice to their politicians and their decision makers. In this platform I am with the people that lives here. So there are the two middle aged asian ladies, talking Tagalog and minding their own business, going home. So is the elder lady with long grey hair, few but old gold in her fingers and an old fashioned but still elegant wool dress, or silk scarf. And so is the young woman that can be a young man, tattooed and beautiful, gleaming black hair and eyes shaded in green and silver. And the black young man, tired and in a hoodie, at the same time defiant and sleepy.
All of them are there, here in Den Haag. And no one see the other.
I have expended my whole life being from somewhere else. So I know that pretty much wherever I land, I will be looked at. As so many others like me, I look back, and smile or not, depending. Those who look at us smile, or not. Depending. What does not depends is that we all, the resident and the newcomer, the normal and the weirdo, the ugly and the espectacular, all of us acknowledge the other, deciding what to do, what to say, what to think. Like anybody else, I have felt welcome in some places, and I have wanted to run from others.
Not in Den Haag.
So I have come to believe that Den Haag, instead of having been shaped by her haven, that haven that is not hers, has been instead defined by her embassies. Those always beautiful houses that host delegations from somewhere else, that host the whole diversity of the whole world.
And that they don’t talk to each other, ever.
Wow, how wonderful!
Beautiful!