So yesterday was a good day...

I took a train to Den Haag - The Hague - even though I'm not a war criminal. I was interested in two places. The first was the MC Escher museum. My parents had a book with all of his prints. I must have spent hours with it, as nearly all of the pictures in the museum were quite familiar to me. It was a strange sense of deja vu. All those times I had looked at the book, and then to see a genuine print...

I also wanted to see The Mesdeg Panorama. It's a 360 degree painting made of the area back in 18??... You enter the panorama in the middle. There's a tarp overhead, and a skylight you can't see. Surrounding you is a lot of sand that falls off, and then you have the painting. The result is very vivid, especially when they play the music. There's a railing that keeps you away from the painting itself so that you can't see the brush strokes. The skylight provides natural light, so as clouds move overhead outside, you see the effects of lighting on the painting.

I continued onto Rotterdam. The architecture is great here. It was mostly flattened by Hitler, and rebuilt after the war. It looks more like an American city to me than any other I've seen in Europe.