De Staat

De Staat certainly has its own style. Dutch for 'the state', it lives up to its name by embracing an aesthetic that lies somewhere between hipster and communist. Hipster communist is actually quite a good way to describe its uniform decoration, with its logo with a five pointed star surrounded by wings and leaves printed everywhere and statues of cartoon bears holding flags. De Staat is situated at the southern beach of Scheveningen, where the beach clubs lie in more isolated positions and must be reached through the tranquil dune park I wrote about earlier. Most of the times, people don't just drop by here for a quick drink, but settle down for the larger part of the day. Thus, a big part of De Staat's terrace is spread out far and wide over the beach in front of it.

We sit down at a low table on the sand. It took some persuading to get Rihanna Gaga to come with me this morning, as she was having too much fun working with me on a dollhouse. This is a promise I made her a long time ago. One of her favourite books is a short story of a boy who finds a chest on the beach and turns it into a dollhouse for his sister. I've always said that we could do that as well and about a week ago I finally came around setting things in motion to start woring on this. It's amazing how you really can find anything for sale on the internet - including fruit chests. So I ordered two of those, bought some cut-to-size bits of wood for the inner walls and to create two floors and this morning, Rihanna Gaga and I started working together. She painted the walls, I sawed little doorways into the pieces of wood and did the planning. By the time we left, we'd finished about one third of the first chest. And Rihanna Gaga was having so much fun, that she had a hard time leaving and ended up making a bit of a scene. But the fact was that even if we'd decided to continue our work, we'd still have had to leave the house, because we needed glue. And since that was the case, we could just as well have our weekly breakfast on the beach anyway.

It's rather busy, but that's because today is that quaint holiday of the second day of pentecost - a peculiar holiday that I think they only have in the Netherlands: a kind of boxing day for pentecost, which in itself is already a rather obscure holday. At least, I think few people could tell you what we are actually supposed to celebrate on this day. De Staat's terrace is filling up quickly, mostly with families with young children and Rihanna Gaga has lots to look at.

There is no service at the table at De Staat, so I walk to the bar to order. Unfortunately, the set breakfast can only be ordered by two persons or more and is so elaborate that it would be madness to expect Rihanna Gaga to eat an entire adult portion. So I order a cheese omelette and a croissant instead, together with a latte macchiato and an apple juice for Rihanna Gaga. When the food arrives, the omelette turns out to be massive: lots of scrambled eggs spread out over two large and thick slices of brown bread. De Staat prides itself on its organic food and the omelette tastes, indeed, very nice.

Rihanna Gaga is too busy to attend to her food right away. She's lying in the sand, telling me that she's pretending the sand is the sea. She makes swimming movements with her arms and legs and loudly proclaims that the weather is so nice and the water so pleasantly warm. Later, she starts running around and singing - as often these days, the song she's singing is her own version of "Let It Go", the extatic hit song from Disney's Frozen that she learned at her daycare. And I must admit: it is a nice song, although I can't say I'm too happy about the daycare teaching her things like this. But in the end, it doesn't matter. If the daycare hadn't done so, she'd have learned of it somewhere else, with society hell bent on turning every little girl into a pink-loving pretty princess. All you can do as a parent is to try and counterbalance things a bit by teaching your daughter to build her own dollhouse and tell her that princesses wear harnesses and kill dragons. Oh, and since the princes that come and save princesses in her story books look decidedly androgynous (what's up with that?), I throw in a few same-sex couples every now and then, to subvert the narrative that girls need saving by men.

I decide my egg needs some pepper and salt and walk inside to get it. When I return, a helpful neighbour is chasing away a seagull that's attacking my breakfast, while Rihanna Gaga throws sand at it (and, as I discover when I start eating again, at my breakfast). Having seen how the seagulls are preying on our food, Rihanna Gaga now wants to eat her own food as well, but only finishes the chunk of scrambled eggs that I put on her plate and a tiny bit of the croissant. Then, she's off again to play. She becomes friends with a girl that is sitting at a table next to ours together with her dad and the two start chasing each other around the terrace. Since almost everyone has children here, I don't feel it's necessary to calm her down. Children are running everywhere and Rihanna Gaga is hardly the most disruptive of them.

As reluctant as she was to come here, she is now equally reluctant to leave. When I tell her it's time to go, she bluntly tells me 'no'. So I order a fresh mint tea and read a little, telling Rihanna Gaga every once in a while that we'll leave soon to get her in a leaving mindset. I also promise her that she can eat the mint leaves (something which she's loved to do ever since we lived in Tunisia) once we're on the bicycle. It works. After a while, she sits down next to me and tells me she's ready to leave. I finish my tea, give her the mint leaves and we get up. I tell her to wave at her friend and she does so dutifully. Then we're on our way. There's a dollhouse to be finished.