Our The Hague explorations start today. We have a 10.45am appointment at the Mauritshuis Museum. It seems you have to book tickets and an entrance time to museums in Europe. It makes for a better distribution of crowds, so they think. Thus our appointment. Wanting to be a bit early we wander down to the tram stop with plenty of time. The first tram does not arrive, we cannot read the sign so we wait with the others at the station. The second tram doesn’t show up so I ask a local what the sign says. She tells me there has be a delay. That is the extent of what the sign offers. So I cross the tracks to see if the bus will take us to where we want to go. Yup it will. A second lady explained there was a city wide power outage last night and the transit systems was having trouble getting all the trams on the road. We caught the bus.
Arrived early at the museum we didn’t have to wait. They just let us in. The Mauritshuis is a small art gallery with many of the works of 17th Century Dutch and Flemish artists. Rembrandt, Rubens and Vermeer being three of the more prominent ones. The Girl with the Pearl Earring being one painting the most people would recognize. I think it is the best gallery of ‘old’ paintings I have visited. I was not overwhelmed by the number of works so I could look at each piece on its own. I was able to see things I had not noted before, like how precise the lines are and how detailed every painting is. The painters of that time possessed an incredible amount of patience and skill.
In search of a map we headed to the central train station. There seemed to be an awful lot of young men dressed in black moving about. We thought is might be a ‘game day’. Which it sort of was. There was a big right wing demonstration rally in the park today. People were protesting the immigration laws. Debbie and I headed the other way. Seems it was a good choice as the protest got somewhat violent with bottles and stones being hurled at the police and the police responding with tear gas and a water cannon. As things heated up there was a police car set ablaze. I think the whole idea is somewhat in contrast to the normal Dutch modus operandi. They are normally quite tolerant of everything. The have a saying “Doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg.”, it means, just act normal, that’s crazy enough. Nothing like a bunch of crazies to spice up a vacation.
We wandered the streets taking in a bit of The Hague with our final destination the M.C. Escher house. Another worthwhile stop. Most of the gallery is Escher limited edition prints from wood cuts and lithographs. The third floor of the gallery is dedicated to some interactive displays and odd pieces from other artists that are interpretations of some of Escher’s ideas.
We again planned a tram ride home but the crazies mentioned managed to disrupt the train schedule so Plan B was put into motion and it was the 22 bus back to our hotel.
Post Script: Yesterday at lunch we had a random act of kindness draped upon us. We were in the train station and ordered fries and a Coke to eat. This train station is very sterile and there are no places to ‘lounge’, no benches to sit upon. I ask one of the security guard if he knew of any not so obvious benches we could sit on to eat our fries. He makes kind of a funny face and said follow me. He then uses his employee pass to let us through the turnstiles that separate the train passengers from the general public. Just on the other side are two picnic tables. We sat and had lunch.