Belgian Waffle

Amsterdam: city of sin and stag parties. I went to the Rijkmuseum - well "Lad".  It had just been refurbished after however long and I figured it was one of the big ones to tick off.  And yeah, the refurb is pretty good, the building is impressive and all the rooms seem all light and airy, the downside of the new, light, airy rooms is that it completely emphasises how brown ALL Dutch art is.  So. Very. Drab. All of it.  

Mainly though, I went to Antwerp. Which may just be the coolest city I've ever been to.  That is if you count "cool" by how many art galleries and cheese shops somewhere has, which I do. Seriously, so many art galleries. Maybe 1 in 5 buildings, until you get to the artist district, by which time it's 2 in 3 - and the things that aren't art galleries are trying to be - clothes shops called Your with a sign in the window "We will rip you off"; basically an art gallery. It was a whole city of Chorlton.

Slight gripe: I feel like all I've eaten is chips, sorry frites.  Even going out in the evening my bucket of mussels came with chips (conversation: "Have you tried muscle sausage?" "Erm?" "Sausage, for your mussels." - he meant sauce - I didn't correct him). I feel somewhat starchy.

More Rained Against than Raining

I was going to call this "Paris When it Drizzles" - the wordplay pleased me - but it would be inaccurate, it didn't drizzle it was full on rain. Rain rain rain. The sort of rain that lets you know it's raining.  Still Paris was pretty good on the whole.  Didn't get to the Musee D'Orsay due to unnecessary queue lengths, and the general meandering was cut a bit short by the aforementioned inclement weather, but apart from that all pretty Parisien, which is no bad thing.

Continued by Peter Nichols fest by going to see A Day in the Death of Joe Egg over in Kingston.  How comes I've never been to Kingston before? It's both quaint and bustling at the same time.  Pleasantly impressed. Play wasn't bad either, nice mix of zany and borderline taboo edginess.

Whilst we're talking plays - and this will lose me some culture points - I didn't get King Lear.  For a play that's often lauded as being The Best Tragedy I just found it boring.  Does that make me a bad person?

Just checked out my blog stats - I'm trending in Malaysia and Indonesia right now.  Guess there's a Peter Nichols revival there too...

Peon Play

I've had quite a Nicholcentric week.

I went to see Peter Nichols' Passion Play.  Enjoyed it but didn't love it.  Not certain that was because the first half is a lot better than the second half or because I was surrounded by cretins who spent the bulk of the play whispering.  Obviously being English I didn't tell them to keep the noise down - that would be far too easy, I just stewed on it for a few days before referring to them as "peons" in a blog that they won't see.

I saw Phil Nichol accidentally.  I'd mainly gone to see Dan Antopolski supporting; he was on first and crashed and burned: always a bit painful to see a comedian die on stage, especially if it's someone who's stuff you like. Not sure what I made of Phil Nichol.  I'm fairly certain that none of his jokes were actually funny - it was all fairly obvious lowest-common-denominator stuff - but he sold everything with such conviction that us peons lapped it up.