Dawn of the second day of Europe trip: the night of the worst sleep. I was naturally up at 4:30 AM and got to see the sunrise. Or had to see the sunrise really, because as a night owl, this is never a sight I want to see. I also reflected on all the idiot moves we did yesterday, as little jetlagged zombies:
- Rhett’s wallet fell out of his pocket in the car and had been in there overnight. He did not miss it yesterday while we were walking around. At all. (I maintain the hypothetical tragedy to a stolen wallet would have been a missing covid vaccine card and not the IDs or credit cards).
- We forgot to lock the car overnight because some of us own self-locking cars. (All fine in the end, we have the wallet).
- Nuked my carrier settings on my phone in a bid to get my Dutch SIM card working, making it so that I probably have to give the pirates at Verizon $10 if I wanted to make my American number work for the next two weeks. (I don’t want to pay the pirates, so….). This also means all my remembered wifi networks have been forgotten. Balls.
- I sent our next ABB host the wrong phone number for our check-in info…so I hope that my number neighbor in the US enjoys a message about our Bruges lodgings if they have WhatsApp.
We ventured outside of Delft today to The Hague, which was about 20 minutes by car from our location. We stayed mainly in the old city center to check out Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery, and then did a long walk through The Hague Forest (Haagse Bos) instead of the government and UN buildings.
The Hague is very different from Delft – many modern buildings are sandwiched around the historic buildings, and it has a small but tall city center.
We got brunch from a place called Happy Tosti – I learned tosti is the dutch word for croque monsieur. Lots of cafes have tostis, but not all of them are happy. Happy Tosti was really good, and I even got a smol stroopwafel with my order. I love stoopwafels and I also love tostis now.
Our first stop: Mauritshuis. Mauritshuis displays a modest collection of Dutch art from the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s home to several paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt and other Dutch masters. The inside resembles a wealthy home, with many fancy chandeliers and wallpapers. My favorite room featured weird sconces holding candles. I was both perturbed and amused.
Really, I’m here for two reasons: to build a real-life visual collection of my animal crossing art museum, and to see weird angry baby Jesuses. Mauritshuis did not disappoint on either front. It has a vast collection of famous paintings, especially for its size. As a goblin, I know most of my art from Animal Crossing – Vermeer’s Girl with a pearl earring is on display here. There was no option to purchase this painting from an enterprising fox for 4,980 bells (a bargain, really) – but it was cool to see how much more vivid it was in real life vs in pictures.
Girl with a pearl earring is a tronie, which is a portrait that wasn’t intended to be either kept by the sitter, or resemble any particular person in real life. I think this makes the painting one of Vermeer’s OCs.
The museum has an app that guides you through the gallery with an easy lookup or audio guide option. Pretty cool! Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order…
And we can’t forget the weird Jesuses! This one is my favorite.
After art, we wandered to the Haagse Bos, which is a large forested park in the middle of the city. It was originally part of a larger forest, and obtained its protected status in the mid-1500s as the area was aggressively deforested for building. It is now home to some ponds, many ducks, and is an off-leash area for dogs to run. I saw many cute doggos.
We hadn’t had our fill of birds for the day though – to round out our evening, we visited a nearby park, Ackerdijske Plassen, that had bird blinds. It was our first taste of non-city streets – most of the streets were about a lane and a half wide, tops, and were frequented by many cyclists. All the houses were across little canals, and had bridges from the road to the house.
The park was a great way to see birds without smelling their doody (always a drawback of any birdwatching/bird tour you might do on a trip) – and was filled with lots of ducks, coots, cormorants, and a few herons!
And – since the second night was happening – I had functional sleep. Yay! We took our time leaving in the morning, making sure to taste test the four different flavors of coke zero we had discovered in the nearby grocery store. (The grocery store which didn’t like any credit cards, which was very annoying).
Our drive today takes us down from Delft and to Bruges. We decided to meander down the coast because it seemed more interesting, and I picked some points at random off of google maps for us to stop at.
Between Delft and Rotterdam, the highway is just a walled-off road – very not scenic.
And then you turn west after Rotterdam and it’s an impressive and also gross area that’s just miles and miles of oil refinery. The oil refinery had some windmills on its perimeter. The windmills weren’t turning, I can only assume these were the windmills that oil companies can point to as their dedication to green initiatives in their shareholder annual reports.
Thankfully, once we got out onto the little oceany islandy bits, things got much lovelier. Much of the way contained massive, spinny windmills that towered over the road and disappeared into the ocean mist.
Our first stop was some world war two bunkers that I found by randomly perusing google maps for interesting things on our route – Bunker Route de Punt. They were originally on the seafront, but due to land reclamation, they are now a few dunes inland. They were lost to blowing sand after the war, and due to their sandy tombs, are pretty well-preserved now.
You can hike up the dunes and wander around, and there were several displays that had information on the weapons, supplies, and people the bunkers housed.
After filling our shoes with sand and our heads with bunker facts, it was time to fill our tummies.
This means it is tosti time! I chose a cultural chimera tosti: kimchi. It was a delicious marriage of food cultures.
Our last stop before our arrival in Bruges was a random-ass castle-turned-hotel I found just south of our lunch stop: Slot Moermond. The drive up was a single lane, which you of course shared with horses, bikes, and pedestrians – who were all much more numerous than cars. There were fortunately only survivors.
The rest of our drive to Bruges took us over a massive dam that was built (the one that enabled land reclamation around the bunkers), and around many massive windmills, and through at least as many roundabouts.
And now we are in Bruges for a week! I can only hope there are tostis.