den Haag

I took a train after class yesterday to den Haag in the Netherlands. I came to visit a Dutch friend I made in Florence during my Euro-trip in 2008. This is my only chance to see him before he moves to Australia for the next year and a half or so. It was great to get away from the errands and allow him to show me around his city. Den Haag's first Museum night was going which, like the Museumsuferfest in Frankfurt, was our ticket into the museums and a few other places participating in the event. There were long lines outside of most of the museums and some had bars and DJs inside. We went around looking at the art, while others enjoyed the party.

I did not recognize the artist of our first museum, Escher in the Lange Voorhout Palace, until we reached his more renowned works. The next museum had a painted panorama of the nearby beach in Scheveningen. It is 1680 square meters, 14 meters high, 120 meters around and puts viewers on a sand dune between the beach and the town as it was in 1880. We spent a lot of time wandering through the Gemeente Museum. There was not enough time to see all the exhibits, which included: Dutch interior design, glass objects, a dollhouse from 1743, and works of Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, Ina van Zyl and so many others.

It is interesting how some pieces catch your eye while others are simply there. As we picked out our favorites and criticized others, his art and my blog were brought up. I expressed my anxieties of making this blog public, seeing as I do not know how people will interpret it or if they would appreciate it like I hoped they would. In the end, we share it for those interested but we do it for ourselves. Much like meeting new people, we must be confident and not worry about how we will be received. Had we not done that two years ago I would never have met him, nor had such a great weekend visiting him.