Den Haag

Today we went to The Hague. We couldn't sleep till morning, so we woke up, talked, and watched some TV. We took the second morning train to the Hague, the sun came up just as we got there. The train left at 7:41am according to the lady who sold us a ticket, and it did to the minute. It took 50 minutes on the dot to get to the Haag Centraal, exactly as she said too. Unfortunately since we were early, it was 2 and a half hours of checking stuff out by walking until anything opened.

Binnenhof is the Dutch parliament building or something like that, it's a big old looking castle type thing with a lake out front, hopefully the attached picture comes through. Rather picturesque, lot's of ducks and white swans hanging out there. We only wandered in a maybe a 5km radius from Haag Centraal where the train dropped us off, so I can't speak for the suburbs, but something about this place tells me there aren't too many rough neighbourhoods nearby. Up and down the quaint to our north American eyes streets, the building office signs were dominated by international consulate offices and other rich or high society sounding places. Everything is ship shape, I haven't seen anything (here or Amsterdam) yet that's derilect, run crummy or even run down.

Once 10:00 came we went for breakfast - original Dutch pancakes for Tori and I had a fried egg sandwich. We washed that down with 2 coffees and 2 hot chocolates and had a grand time relaxing.
11am was when the Maurits Cornelis Escher museum opened. I think we spent a full three hours in there, talk about a cool place. Not only did we get to see his life's work, but also videos, computer simulations/decompositions that illustrate the logical jumps that created his work that are impossible (for me) to see without animations bringing them to life, after which they're still basically impossible to grasp. There's also computers to play with and a floor of hands on activities and videos (mini wraparound imax style screen) to bring it to life and help understand it. To say it was a mind stretching experience is probably an understatement, it was so awesome. The final touch was that the ceiling lights in the basement cafe were giant blown glass bugs.

The ride home let us sight see more. Nice farmland, nice bike paths along the train line, lots of garden plots along the train tracks, and of course it's full of canals and dykes. Pretty neat to see the amount of effort put into maintaining the land and country.

Evening we went for a pizza at an Italian restaurant wanted to go, then just chilled out for a few hours. Big day, we were tired at the end of the day.