Den Haag

Yesterday we went to Den Haag, known to international criminals the world over as The Hague. The city is a surprising jumble of ultra modern white cubes, wacky 90's architectural mélanges and traditionally Dutch 19th century town houses.



The Hague is quite a wealthy city, and even the seagulls look posh.


We went to visit the Mauritshuis, one of the great museums of the Netherlands.

we saw these guys there






Also, these guys




Pie - the international language of friendship



On the train home.

Biblical Museum

Yesterday I visited Amsterdam's not particularly well known Bijbels Museum - the Museum of Bibles. I read somewhere that they had one of the Isiah scrolls from Qumran and I thought I'd check it out. The museum lies in the Herengracht, which is an old and beautiful canal street. When I arrived there was a poster advertising a traveling exhibit of Giotto frescoes from a chapel in Padua! The museum is in a huge 17th century canal house and has preserved little tableau of rich burger life. Bypassing the furniture collection, I headed for Giotto; disfortunatamente, when I got to the Giotto exhibit, it turned out to be a traveling show of photos of Giotto frescoes, cleverly arranged to replicate the experience of standing in the chapel. Next, I went to look for the Isiah scroll. I once saw a tiny fragment of one of the dead sea scrolls, and I was excited about seeing one of the major ones intact. Scrolls like Isiah were really important for Judeo-Christian-Islamic scholars as, among other things, they allowed us to compare our relatively late copies of Old Testament texts with much older ones. Strike two: the scroll was made of plaster. It looked like it was from a really high-class Dead Sea gift shop.



As it turns out, the museum is largely devoted to a series of minutely crafted 19th century models of the Holy Land. These are of an enormous model of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.








As well as models there are curio cabinets with Egyptian, Jewish and Roman knickknacks and ephemera. They even had a mummy, with the grisly head unwrapped and placed on a shelf of its own.




There was a large model of the Arc of the Covenant with the high priest at prayer on the Day of Atonement, backed by a video projection of scenes from Israel, interspersed with shots of dolls in Hebrew outfits.




And of course, the obligatory view finder exhibits.





The museum also had Bibles, lots and lots of bibles...





It was such an old school museum, I loved it.

Amsterville

It's Easter Vacation and I've spent the past week in Amsterdam visiting Rahel. It is really, really cold here - it's apparently the coldest March the Netherlands have seen in 40 years.



Rahel lives in a shipping crate, or rather, a gigantic metal shipping container. If you were to order 40,000 t-shirts from China, they would probably arrive in a giant metal box identical to Rahel's pad. The difference being that Rahel's has hard wood floors, tasteful fixtures and a kitchen.



This being Amsterdam, the parking lot looks like this.



Last night we ventured out into the snow to meet up with Rahel's friend Silvia. The walk there was brutally cold, but the bar was warm and ultra-euro, with lots of white patent leather.






Amsterdam: good city, bad climate.

My old friend Toby has been in Oxford for the past couple of days, and we've had a blast. He's a phenomenal photographer and took some of the following pictures (the ones with people).





Thursday morning we set out on a walk , hoping to follow the Thames up to town. Despite a borrowed map of the area, we got hopelessly lost in Oxfordshire.





Our footpaths lead us through sleepy villages and farms, through plowed fields, suburban backyards and a llama ranch.




We stopped in a couple of country pubs along the way and found excellent fish and chips.



We eventually found the river and walked up to Oxford, and by the time we got there, we felt like this:



When we got back to College, we stumbled into the final preparations for Bright Hour, the College's end of term party hosted by my awesome classmate Colin.

There were many entertainments, including two anonymous tutors, who gave an exhibition of 'manly' spiritual aerobics to a Lenard Cohen song.



More of Toby's photos can be seen at: www.tobymorris.com

Blenheim Palace

Rahel's father and his partner Anna-Martin were in town this weekend and we spent Sunday at Blenheim Palace, the stately childhood home of Winston Churchill. Parts of the house have been well preserved with books, pictures and furniture in the places left by their owners, but others have been filled with wacky anamatronic scenes from the palace's past. The worst part of these displays was the recorded actor's impassioned pseudo-Shakespearian speech: the architect Vanbrugh's conservative and well proportioned architectural plan for Blenheim was described as 'Mad Vanbrugh's lurid dream!'

Afterwards we came back to Cuddesdon and had dinner at the Bat & Ball, Cuddesdon's cricket themed country pub. We were expecting sausage, potato's and fried fish, but instead got brazed lamb shoulder, Catalan fish stew and stilton-mushroom tarts. The food was really good.

Though Sunday was beutiful, today the skies above Cuddesdon are a dark grey, and we are awaiting what are supposed to be the most violent storms of the year.

College Scarves and Rugby

Last night I went into town to see Ne Touchez pas la Hache, Jacque Rivette's new Balzac adaptation. It was true to the spirit of Balzac: beautiful, moving and melodramatically schmaltzy. The walk home was pretty. I was kept warm by my recently acquired college scarf.








This morning at breakfast my classmate David's wife Sarah asked me if I were coming to play rugby. I really thought she was kidding, so when I said I might, I didn't realize I would be pressed into a full-on rugby match immediately after breakfast. As it turns out, (touch, rather than brutal tackle) rugby is a wonderful game. Better than dodge ball.






St. Patrick’s Day comes early this year, but not early enough for Cuddesdon. We're celebrating the life of the saintly snake charmer tonight, and I've been asked to sit-in with the Celtic band Zwingli and the Radicals. This is the concert poster:



Jovial, aware of current events and comfortably dressed: Yes, me boyos it's Zwingli and the Radicals! No one could be more excited about St. Patty's than me,



except maybe this guy.