Pétanque & Pastis

Escher in the Palace

Our next stop in Den Haag was the 18^th-century Lange Voorhout Palace, the small, elegant home to the works of the renowned Dutch graphic artist, Maurits Cornelis Escher, better known simply as M.C. Escher.  Dave and I have always been interested in the recursive quality of many of Escher’s works, such as “Drawing Hands”, “Waterfall”, and “Ascending and Descending”.  In programming, recursion is when a function or procedure calls itself, possibly resulting in an infinite loop.  The same principle is exemplified in these works of Escher’s, where a principle subject in a drawing is defined in terms of itself, and you cannot tell where one thing begins and another ends, resulting in an infinite loop.

The finalé of our visit led us to the “Room of Escher”, where we donned virtual reality headsets which enabled us to imagine that we were actually moving through one of Escher’s 3-dimensional works.

Canal House Architecture

The canals of Amsterdam are lined with charming gabled houses, almost all of which have a winch hook at the top, and many of which deliberately tilt forward toward the street in order to use the winch hook to pull up household goods without crashing against the windows of the house.  A law was enacted in the year 1565 which limits the lean to 1:25, to lower the risk of the houses falling over into the streets.  Originally, property owners were taxed on how wide their houses were, so they tended to build them very narrow and tall.

In the photograph above, the dark gray house with the burgundy-colored shutters is an example of a Warehouse-Style Spout Gable, and three houses down on the right-hand side of the photograph shows an example of a Bell Gable.

In the photograph below, the prominent house on the left is an example of a Step Gable, while the prominent house on the right is an example of a Simple Triangular Gable.

Amsterdam

After a whirlwind, two-month stay in California, we’ve returned to Europe, a month earlier than we had planned because Dave needs to be here for work.  It was a whirlwind stay because when we returned home, we put our house up for sale, sold it, and had all our things moved into storage for an unknown period of time.  We plan to buy a condo when we return because we think it will be much easier to maintain than a house, since we are leaving it empty for six months out of the year while we stay in France.

Our first day in Amsterdam was a bit of a shock due to the cold.  We left 65°F weather in San Francisco to arrive into    38°F weather here in the Netherlands.  Even in the cold, Amsterdam is such a beautiful city to stroll around.  Fortunately, the Glüwein (hot spiced-wine) and the spicy Indonesian food work very well to keep one warm and toasty.