We have not had a great deal of luck with European travel over the years, having found about 50% of our outward journeys disrupted by a variety of things, ranging from a train fault to the refugee crisis to the Brussels bombings. Nevertheless, on Monday we embarked on our first foreign holiday since 2017, only to find that an earlier train had knocked down an overhead cable somewhere in southern Belgium, with the result that our train arrived in Brussels Midi six and a half hours later than it should have done after a long and tedious delay during which the buffet car ran out of everything apart from olives (they may have run out of those too, by the end) and terminated there instead of continuing on to Rotterdam and Amsterdam, leaving a lot of tired and annoyed people to get turned away from the high-speed train which the Eurostar announcements had assured us we could get and rush desperately around Brussels Midi to work out how to continue our journeys (eventually we located the Dutch InterCity train for Amsterdam) rather than being able to take a bit of time out, stretch our legs and find food and drink.
We eventually got to our destination (Den Haag) just before 10pm, when we should have been there at lunchtime, and most restaurants and takeaways in the Netherlands close at 9:30. Fortunately, we had booked a studio with a kitchenette and the supermarket opposite the station was still open, so we were able to acquire microwavable food and make a cup of tea before collapsing into bed, but it was definitely the kind of journey that makes you wonder what the point of holidays is.
Fortunately, the rest of the break was much nicer. We went to the Mauritshaus (where we saw Fabritius's Goldfinch*, but not Girl with a Pearl Earring, as all the Vermeers were in Amsterdam for a big exhibition at the Rijksmuseum) and the Escher museum, and saw an incredible 19th-century panorama of the beach at Schevening, as well as walking to the actual beach at Schevening. We got a tram to Delft and had a potter around there, and we ate rijstaffel and poffertjes and apple cake, and also spent a lovely evening with
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clanwilliam, and then had a trouble-free journey home.
And now we're home, and annoyingly I don't feel any less tired for having had a break (possibly because it was quite a busy break, really), plus the world is still washing up and down a bit from spending so much time on trains. And there's nothing like being in a country that isn't completely fucked for a few days to make you realise just how rubbish things actually are in the UK these days. We walked down streets free of litter and full of thriving shops, ate fantastic meals for about the same price as a chain restaurant in the UK, hopped on and off frequent and efficient (and, once again, clean) public transport even late at night. (Of course, Den Haag is also a capital city, and presumably has a generally well-off, educated and professional population who can afford to support the shops and restuarants, unlike Oxford, which is basically populated by students, academics and tourists and doesn't really support a professional class.)
*which prompted me to read Donna Tartt's novel of the same name, which I really don't recommend, as it basically reminded me of all the reasons I don't read literary fiction much; it's basically about unpleasant things happening to a fairly unpleasant and extremely privileged person, and then takes a hard swerve into gangster thriller territory about two-thirds of the way in. And it's almost 800 pages long.
