Cologne Sunday

Sunday was a pretty relaxing day for the most part (though still crummy weather). I started it off by watching Hilary Duff's "Raise Your Voice" dubbed in German while I got ready. I'm embarrassed to say I followed every bit of it, not because of my excellent German (I don't sprechen) but because I've seen it at least twice, which is 2 more times than is acceptable.

I ended up meeting Henry for a little bit before his train left in the afternoon. We (he) got some Chinese guy to take a photo of us in front of the Dom, but for some reason I'm not able to steal it from him and post it here. 

After Henry caught his train, I went to Museum Ludwig, which has lots of Picassos and the largest collection of pop art outside of the US. It also has some really really strange stuff. I'm not going to try to define what counts as art, but some of this seems like it's stretching it a bit. Like this:

It's a video set up in a dark room. And I don't know if you can tell or not, but the image behind those white rectangles is a butt. A naked butt walking. Talk about artsy fartsy.

This one looks like something a kid drew at a psychiatrist's office as they try to get to the root of his fear of spiders and breasts.

Some pop art:

Andy Warhol's Double Elvis. In German, they call it Doppel-Elvis, which I found amusing because all the Germans I know think it's funny that the English language just stole the word doppelganger without changing it at all. Maybe they're not aware that most everything in American culture is stolen from somewhere else.

This bored lady is actually one of the works of art. She doesn't seem too impressed with Lichtenstein's pieces.

And then Picasso. I have a lot more photos but I figure you guys probably didn't care to look at a bunch of photos of paintings.

There were also some pieces by lots of famous artists, like Miro, Magritte, Mondrian, Pollock, Jasper Johns and Kandinsky.

After the museum closed, I still had several hours to kill until my train (because the later tickets were cheaper) so I got some uninteresting dinner and hung out at a Starbucks. My train ended up being delayed 30 minutes, which made me a little anxious about making a train in Utrecht and then a tram in The Hague since it would be getting late and I don't know when transportation stops running. 

But luck was on my side and there were still a few trains to The Hague and I made the very last tram to my neighborhood, putting me at home around 1. I just have one international trip left (Paris in a few weeks) and thankfully, my train should get me home much earlier than 1. And because I don't have many trips left to talk about, I might just have to do some more Italian posts. All in favor?

Brussels Sunday

As promised, here's the second part of my weekend in Brussels. I went to bed Saturday night watching The Simpsons (in English, with Dutch subtitles) and Parenthood (dubbed in French). Being in a French-speaking country was actually really refreshing for me. While I'm nowhere near fluent, it's nice to be able to read signs, recognize a fair amount of the words being spoken around me and have a little break from the hacking and gagging of Dutch. 

On Sunday morning, I packed my stuff up, checked out of my hotel and went out wandering again. Just when I thought I was lost, I turned a corner to see this:

Town Hall again. I still think it's beautiful.

Brussels had weather pretty similar to most days in The Hague: gray and rainy. Some of the streets got pretty slick for me and my cheap American boots. You'll be relieved to know that I didn't fall, though I came close several times. I carefully made my way to the Manneken Pis (or at least in the general direction of the Manneken Pis...and a waffle stand).

Once I saw this crowd, I knew I'd found it. All the surrounding streets were basically empty and then suddenly there are 30 people trying to get a picture with a tiny peeing boy. 

See how small he is? I knew that coming into the trip, but I figured when in Brussels, do as the Brussels tourists do.

Then I went to find an area where a few museums live. It's in the higher part of town, so I had to struggle uphill, but I was rewarded with this great view once I got there.

I went to the Musical Instrument Museum, which looks really awesome from the outside. I wish you could tell better from my picture, but if you're curious, go look it up yourself, you lazy bum. Something about it looks kind of steam punk-y to me, and I secretly love steam punk (the design, not the weird sci-fi nerd stuff).

The inside was full of all kinds of musical instruments and cool old things. And I had to guess what some of it was because the explanations were only in French and Dutch.

They had a carillon, which I had never seen before. And I'm not posting a photo so that you'll have to go to Brussels to see it. Or you could Google it, but Brussels is more fun.

A grandpa Mac. I took this photo mostly so my laptop could see one of its ancestors. He's resting comfortably in a display about electronic music.

The worst part about the whole museum was that you couldn't touch any of the instruments. I reeeeally wanted to. Instead, I got to wear big goofy headphones that would start playing music automatically when I stepped close to the instruments. The bad lighting in the place served me well in this photo as you can't tell quite how goofy the headphones are on me.

This museum was full of some crazy instruments. Like this one. It's basically a music box, but somehow it plays horns. I took a lot of pictures of the other crazy things, but a lot of them didn't turn out too well with the lighting and the glass cases. But they had a bunch of traditional instruments from around the globe, trombones with bells that looked like dragons, two-foot-long ocarinas and cornets with curly tubing.

They had a ton of weird-looking pianos (and clavichords). This one's definitely not the craziest, but it's one of the better photos. 

Me again. Behind me are mouth harps (or Jew's harps) and the music they played with it actually sounded really awesome. Good for the Jews.

After the museum, I walked around again (this time downhill) until I found Central Station and was able to hop on a train pretty quickly. And it was actually the correct train this time. (Though I stupidly did not take any pictures of said trains. Next time, maybe). 

Escher museum

I've finally made it through a full week here! This one dragged by, but I have a feeling the rest will go a bit faster now that I've started my internship (and have actual human interaction!).

On Tuesday, my last day of freedom, I visited Escher at the Palace, a museum about artist M.C. Escher housed at some old palace in The Hague.  I felt like I had to do some kind of sightseeing (because what kind of tourist doesn't sightsee?), and Den Haag has about a million museums. One down, a million minus one to go.

Just another run-of-the-mill palace around here.

Escher's probably more famous for his tessellations (I remember having to try to make one in 5th or 6th grade math. It was ugly and we used no math to draw it) or his crazy reality-bending drawings (like below), but I really like his wood cuts, like this one. I'm not entirely sure why; it's something about the 2-D-ness of it and the bold shapes.  

This is one of those trippy ones. So trippy, in fact, they used it in Labyrinth. 

I may not be able to make tessellations like Escher, but I can make self-portraits in big shiny balls like him.

These next ones aren't pieces by Escher, but I just thought this museum had the craziest chandeliers. I don't know if they were in the palace originally, but they're just nuts. 

An umbrella...

...a pipe (in the background)...

...and a skull. Not to mention a wine bottle, a guitar, a bomb, a globe and an artist's palette. 

I'll have another picture post in a day or two, and then maybe something about my internship, depending on how interesting I think I can make it sound.