A Colourful Life

Today the Conference committees finished at 1pm giving everyone half a day to chill, thrill, walk, talk, recover, whatever.  Our students wanted to shop but Pelin and I went to the Escher museum housed in the former Winter Palace of the old Queen Mother, Emma of the Netherlands (1858-1934).  A small, but very pretty palace.   After a pleasurable couple of hours admiring Escher's etchings, lithographs, drawings and prints plus of course all the whacky, bizarre and beautiful interactive exhibits on the  top floor that I enjoyed so much last year  (here) - we left feeling thoroughly satiated but too tired to tackle the nearby Dutch History museum.  So we walked around town and found a great place called Cafe Juliana's - furnished with varnished wood, cast iron and brass candelabra - cross between an old C19 city pub and brewery housed inside a Victorian railway station waiting room - the overall ambience was very nostalgic in a rather stark  warm and comfortable kind of way.  (You can Google the place !)  Anyway, I mention this at such length because I drank my very first ever ROSE (pink) BEER there !  Yes.  Really. Pink beer.  Definitely worthy of a journal entry.  Rather sweet - cross between Cherry Aid and Rose wine and a lager. No, probably won't drink it again, but it was worth the adventure and the 2.5 euros.  After this unusual pit stop we started walking around The Hague in earnest - to see China Town - which turned out to be very disappointing once we were past the very pretty arched gateway (pictured).  In spite of the bitter cold we carried on walking around until I wanted to sit down and have a drink and she wanted to window shop, whereupon we went our separate ways until dinner* and so this part of my day ended in the Miller bar again with what is called a "white beer" here in Holland.


*Dinner cuisine chosen was Lebanese which should have been wonderful but was a major mediocre culinary experience in a draughty and cold restaurant - both physically and metaphorically.  Falafel.


I seem to be writing too much this week - hope to employ pithy understatement or lyrical verse once life reverts to the usual stuff, but this week is simply too interesting to let it slip by unnoticed and I am too exhausted to try to write a la John Donne.