Instead of the old familiar seaside board walk, Scheveningen has its
stone paved Boulevard, a mile and a quarter long and eighty feet wide.
This is the promenade of the international hodgepodge of holiday
makers, augmented on a Sunday and in the evenings by giggling girls
and sober countenanced fishermen from the village. Invariably dressed
in their best Sunday-go-to-meetings, the most conspicuous feature of
the feminine attire is a wide shawl, often suggesting the Persian in
design, worn tight about the shoulders and reaching down to the waist
in the back. Of course the skirts are padded voluminously about the
hips, and the girls display at the temples many varieties of gilded
antennæ to hold their white caps securely.
About midway of the Boulevard and back of it, stands the ever present
Kurhaus, although what they profess to cure in that house may simply
be a reluctance on the part of the holder to diminish his letter of
credit. It is three hundred feet or more in length, this Kurhaus, and
its commodious hall, in which are held some very excellent symphony
orchestra concerts, can seat as many as 3,000 people. On the side
of the Kurhaus overlooking the sea there is a large stone terrace
where the band plays in the afternoons, and, underneath this, a very
expensive café.
Just opposite the Kurhaus is the pier--a real old-fashioned ocean
going steel pier, terminating in a concert pavilion and built right
out into the water for almost a quarter of a mile, having a plate
glass partition down the middle, so that there is a lee and a weather
side to it. At intervals along its sides are fish nets, which may be
raised from or lowered into the water by means of a crank and spindle
attached to the pier railing. These are rented to the public on the
time basis, and there is ever a group of persistent people vibrating
between one net and another in the hope that its operator may bring
to the rail a real denizen of the watery depths. I contracted the
fever one day myself and fell in with this flitting crowd for an hour,
more or less, only to be unrewarded in the end, but I am told that if
anything piscatorially larger than an adult white-bait inadvertently
becomes enmeshed in any of the nets and is brought to the surface the
successful fisher receives round after round of enthusiastic applause.
And Scheveningen is in no sense of the word a philanthropic
institution. Everything in the place has its price mark tagged securely
on. You have to pay to walk on the pier, concert or no concert; you
have to pay to listen to the band from the Kurhaus terrace; you have
to pay to sit in one of the yellow mushroom chairs that make the beach
resemble a fungus growth; you have to pay even to take a bath in the
ocean, and are then restricted to the hours of from seven in the
morning until sunset. On Sundays they close up the ocean for bathing
purposes at 2 P.M.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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