We’ve been in Den Haag for a month now, and people are starting to ask me all the time to tell them “what it’s like”. What can I say?

More to the point, what can’t I say? Let’s start with the name of the neighborhood I live in: “Scheveningen”. Probably you know that Dutch is a guttural language, with several variants of what a linguist would define as a consonant but I think of as associated with bronchial conditions. Even this won’t prepare you for pronouncing “skay-ven-inng-en”. The legend is that members of the resistance would expose suspected Nazi spies by tricking them into pronouncing the city’s name.

I’ve gotten good enough at it that I can indicate to a taxi driver where I live. I even got an appreciative nod from a storekeeper once.”Where do you live?” he asked. “Scheveningen.” “Not bad, not bad,” he said, clearly not commenting on the neighborhood itself, but my pronounciation of it.

Scheveningen was the hunting ground for Dutch nobles since 1000 AD. Courtiers dropping like burrs from the hunting jackets of the nobles started building houses a fawning distance from the manors, initiating the typical cascade of bourgeois sprawl. There goes the neighborhood. Today, Scheveningen is barely separated from Den Haag proper by a beltway of trees and parks, remnants of the hunting grounds where peasant poachers lusted after fat noblemen’s fat rabbits. Scheveningen’s principal attraction (for which a hefty surcharge goes on the rents) is the beach, which for a few sunny days of the year in June is apparently a sort of rudimentary beach resort.

The courtier’s influence didn’t end. Though the capital is in Amsterdam, Den Haag is inexplicably the ‘center of government’, and it seems most of the residents either have government jobs (with all that entails) or work for large multinationals. It’s been this way for years; I’m thankful to the Rough Guides for this quote from Matthew Arnold in 1859:

It’s not as bad as all that, but you can see where he was coming from.

There are about six blocks of charming brick buildings blocking the wind from the North Sea. (“It gets really cold when the wind comes from the East, from Russia”, we were told.) The streets are all the same red brick as the buildings, mortared with a cunning mixture of North Sea rain and copious dogshit. A few people have appeared to believe me when I tell them Californians clean up after their dogs, but the Dutch are very polite.

There are canals! Yes. They’re everywhere, and the larger ones are named. The one we live on is the largest in Den Haag; it’s name is “Het Kanal”, or “The Canal”. The Dutch reputation for frugality is not undeserved.

In many ways Den Haag is typically European: good cheese, churches (“big church? That’s not a big church.”), cheap wine, inexplicably inconvenient shopping hours. But it somehow has a whiff of new to it, like the Ikea AMSTERDAM line of interior furnishings. Please note I am not presuming; it’s still older than any city in the United States, having started its serious growth in the 1600s. It’s the home of the Queen (though I haven’t yet seen her at the grocery store) and full of imposing, regal governmental buildings that empty at 4 pm.