Restaurant Waves at the Kurhaus

Thins Rihanna Gaga likes about the Netherlands: Everybody speaks Dutch (this doesn't cease to amaze her, and every once in a while she will turn and look at us when overhearing people talk on the streat to express her surprise over this weird fact); there's free and good playgrounds everywhere; we have a cat now; there is a petting farm just around the corner from where we live.

We've just been to the latter, a cozy affair with goats, sheep, cows, chickens, rabbits, and cavias, as well as a small playground with slings and a slide. She's played a bit and then told me she was hungry, so now we're on our way to one of the fanciest places around Scheveningen: the Kurhaus, where once kings and queens slept and dined. Rihanna Gaga is not sitting in her stroller - instead, she on her three wheeles kick scooter, on which she stands while I push her. The kick scooter was given to her by her grandmother, my mother, and is of high quality, with the kind of wheels you'd normally find on inline skates, so she glides smoothly whyle I only have to apply a minimum of pressure to push her onwards. In fact, this is an incredibly easy way to get around with her and we normally move at a normal or even quick walking pace. She's enjoying it a lot, while I praise her for her good steering.

We're not alone. Rihanna Gaga tells me her friends are with us on their kick scooters as well. "Ah," I say, "your pretend friends!" She agrees enthusiastically, calling out the three names of her imaginary friends. She's had imaginary friends for a few months now. While playing in our house in Tunisia, she would sometimes suddenly say "dingdong!" and open the door to enthusiastically greet an invisible somebody coming to visit her, ranging from kids from her daycare to a little bird. In our house in Scheveningen she continues to play this game, now always with her three favourite friends from Tunisia. I feel it is one of the ways in which she deals with the fact that she'll not see those again. She often has long conversations with them, or plays games together. I think it testifies both of her capacity to find solutions for things that she finds difficult - at which she is very good - and a great imagination. But I also find it important to point out to her that people that she imagines into being are not the same as real people, so I always point out that she's talking to pretend friends. "Yes," she says now. "Those are my pretend friends" - and then she adds: "On their pretend kick scooters!" We both laugh about this clever remark.

We're at the Kurhaus now, me walking and her still on her kick scooter, and we smoothly enter through its large revolving door. The marble floor inside is excellent for her scooter and she elegantly glides towards the elevator. She tells me she has to pee, so I say: "Okay, we'll go to the toilet." Somewhat to my surprise, she simply nods and says: "yes!" I behave casually, but this is a big moment. If she actually goes to the toilet here, it will be the first time, after several attempts in Istanbul last spring and a few days ago in the train, that she pees in a strange toilet. We leave the elevator and park her kick scooter next to the winding stairs to the toilets, where we go down. We've been here quite regularly when she was still a very small baby. I used to drink tea and read in the old tearoom of the Kurhaus while she slept in her pusher and sometimes I'd have to go down to the toilet to change her nappy. Not today. Today she walks to the toilet as if she's never done anything else, sits down and pees. "There's no noise here," she says, by way of explanation of why she has no problem here, but couldn't at the toilet in the train.

We wash our hands and go up again, only to find the old tearoom closed. The large lunchroom which used to be located in the main hall of the Kurhaus, is also gone, replaced by a collection of very ugly statues. I look around and see that in a wing that used to house the main restaurant is now a combination of tearoom and restaurant, called Waves at the Kurhaus. We walk to that part. Immediately at the entrance there are large, comfy chairs looking out at the sea. A but further are restaurant tables. And there is a corner with toys and other things for kids to play. I sit down at the comfy chairs next to the kid's corner and Rihanna Gaga immediately heads for it, playing with a car like structure where she places herself at the steering wheel and her imaginary friends behind her.

I order scrambled eggs with bacon, an apple juice for Rihanna Gaga and a strong Belgian beer for myself. The place is tastefully decorated, with brown, classic looking furniture. Men in suits are working on laptops, senior bourgeois couples sit and eat at the tables. The walls are covered with drawings of restaurant and café scenes - sometimes a bit risqué, but never too. Pop songs play at an almost inaudible volume. I read, Rihanna Gaga plays. When the food is brought, she wants to eat her part it at a colourful kids table next to the play corner. We take a slice of bread with eggs and bacon each, but Rihanna Gaga doesn't completely finish hers. The play corner is too interesting. By now, she's figured out how the touch screen works and she's playing puzzles on it. I have no idea how she realised it was a touch screen, nor how she found out how to handle it - I guess we are born with an innate ability to  handle whatever happen to be the dominant media devices of our time. I never had to learn how to handle a remote control for the television and similarly, nobody ever had to tell Rihanna Gaga how to swipe. The world in the novel I am reading - Rumania in the late 1980s - and the one Rihanna Gaga is playing in, are lightyears removed from each other.

It's a sunny day and when I look up from my book, I can see the horizon very clearly. Large ships lay anchored beneath it and at the beach, enormous cranes are taking away the last parts of the beach clubs that closed last week. I tell Rihanna Gaga that I'll pay and then we'll leave. When I return from paying, she is ready to go. We put on our coats and leave through the door that leads to the large terraces of the Kurhaus, overlooking the sea and beach, with stairs that lead to the boulevard, where Rihanna Gaga gets on her kicking scooter again and we walk all the way to Scheveningen village, where we will go to shop at the supermarket. Halfway there, Rihanna Gaga tells me that she has to pee again and I ask whether she can hold out until we get home. She simply nods. We shop and then
go home.