The Beach of Scheveningen During the Covid Pandemic
On a hot August Saturday, we went for a visit to Den Haag. It is also home to Scheveningen, a beach resort district of which I had never heard before. It would turn out that the beach of Scheveningen during the Covid pandemic is a weird and conflicting experience (as any travelling and seeing new places in these times is), but for more than one reason.
So my Italian partner suggested we go to a beach since it’s hot. Well, when you say “Let’s go to the beach” to a Finn, we get a picture of a small idyllic place at a lake with perhaps 25 people spread on it as far away from each other as possible. We imagine sitting on a towel and listening to the silence while falling asleep in the sun with a book on our belly.
I was subconsciously guided by this kind of a mental image, of which I became aware only on the spot. We took the tram and emerged into a place that is not a beach but a sea village buzzing with locals, immigrants, and tourists on this beach well over four kilometres long and 100 metres wide. The famous pier is the equivalent of a mall -or, for a Finn, a boat going to Stockholm or Tallinn- and doesn’t really remind of the much more modest piers I have seen in the UK.
Exactly 367 years ago, on August 10, 1653, the Battle of Scheveningen took place between the Dutch and the English fleets. It was last battle of the first Anglo-Dutch war. The Dutch fleet suffered a defeat, but declared a victory anyway: After all, they had managed to achieve their strategic goal, the lifting of a Royal Navy blockade.
The history of Scheveningen as a beach resort dates back to 1818, when the first wooden building offering changing rooms appeared there. Nowadays, Scheveningen with its 53 000 inhabitants is the wealthy, northernmost district of the Hague, with the house prizes reaching imaginary numbers. It has its own esplanade, lighthouse, and a casino. It is a mixture of Rimini, Tenerife, and Las Vegas, with the exception that the cues to kiosks selling fried potatoes are longer than anywhere else in the universe.
It struck me how completely branded the Scheveningen beach is, how utterly devoted to the God of capitalism. Everything is about buying. Every single café and shop is branded and designed to deliver not only services and goods but experiences to the point where I just don’t get it. There is very little unique, personal touch to anything. The place tries to make people spend money by pleasing everyone and being as generically touristic as possible. The result is that instead of wanting to spend any money, I just want to escape.
I also realized how un-Dutch I am in my beach philosophy. For me, a towel, sunglasses, and a bottle of water are all that is needed. Looking around I understood that the beach experience consists of buying everything and then bringing everything with you to the beach. People bring chairs and barbecues, small tents, massive swimming toys, gigantic water pistols, food and drinks enough for an army, water pipes (hookahs), stereos, books, games. After seeing how much stuff people brought with them and how much food was being consumed on the beach and everywhere else, I’m not surprised by the media buzz on the mess people made in Scheveningen this weekend. In the end, the only ones really having a party at the cost of everyone else were probably the seagulls, here attacking food left behind by the people at the beach boulevard.
More about birds. Even if things like this easily come off as tourist-traps (and give more flashbacks of e.g. Tenerife), we really liked this guy in the picture with his beautiful Ara parrots. He was offering tourists a chance to get a photo of themselves with the birds and gave off a vibe of genuine happiness in doing his job. He was handling the parrots with kindness and familiarity, as if truly knowing their unique personalities. The birds, sitting completely free in open air, showed their character when a young woman stepped up to have herself photographed with them. In a minute, her sunglasses were thrown on the ground from her head, and she got a new hairdo in the hands of an energetic parrot tramping away all over her head.
Tough Questions of Pandemic-time Travelling
In the times of a global pandemic, any kind of travelling and tourism becomes a question loaded with even more ethical questions and dilemmas as usual. In this case, I found myself to be in this scenario of thousands of people enjoying their beach experience without any attempt to wear masks or exercise social distancing completely off guard. In the tram on our way to the beach and back, everyone wore masks, but social distancing was a joke -we were packed close to each other like sardines in a can. Some people chose to wear their mask as a jaw-cover, exposing both their nose and their mouth, making the whole mask wearing into nothing more than a social ritual.
In my free-lance journalism work, I have recently dug deeper into the topic of Covid. By interviewing several professionals, I have come to understand how much misunderstandings and lies are circulating in the media about the pandemic. I always vote for reason and making informed choices, but what they are in reality is a tougher question than we would like to think.
The Covid pandemic offers plenty of chances to pose as a moral, smart individual doing the right thing. The media in many countries likes to construct the whole Covid pandemic as a matter of individual moral choices and convince the people that the future is all in their hands, strengthening the incentives for social displays of one’s morality. Everyone likes to show that they are doing the ethically and/or intellectually superior thing: For some, this is manifested by not wearing a mask and respecting the social distancing, for some, it is doing the exact opposite.
It is tempting to criticize and judge others for making poor choices. However, much of Europe is currently under a heatwave. Just a look at the numbers of our home thermometer gives a hint to why I understand many people rush to the beach just like we did. Short time comfort over long term safety? Sounds so very human! Perhaps most of the folks at the beach were just as surprised as us of how packed the beach was and how utterly impossible it was to keep 1.5 meters away from everyone else, but decided to stay anyway?
Only the day after this sweltering summer day in the Hague and Scheveningen did we realize that the topic of Scheveningen was trending on Twitter. Several Dutch newspapers were reporting either on the masses on the beach or on the mess these masses left after them (even for those who do not read Dutch, the point of this and this article should be clear). On Facebook, the groups for expats in the Netherlands were busy discussing whether the Scheveningen beach with the thousands of people doing everything else but keeping social distance or caring about hygiene is outrageous, normal, crazy, or completely uninteresting.
All choices we make, also the not-choosing-of-something, is an act. Posting about this beach is an act. A part of me thinks that Scheveningen is worth a visit once in the summer. Another part of me thinks that now in the Covid time, it is not worth a visit at all. I did my visit and am probably not going back any time soon. Perhaps I will go there next year when -hopefully- the pandemic has been put under control. Until that -let’s just keep safe, make a new choice if we realize we have made a bad one, and stop being judgmental to each other.
