Off to the museum

A few things to post about today...

First, I did indeed have a happy birthday (despite several months of "I don't want to turn thirty" and Stefan's "very funny" jokes about my old age).  Look at the pretty flowers Mel sent: Stefan said she's showing him up ;)

As my birthday present, Stefan planned a couple of day trips.  We went on one this past Sunday, and the other is still a surprise, marked off in June on my calendar.  He found a town just across the border in Belgium, Tongeren, which -- like plenty of places around here -- dates from the Roman period.  Their Gallo-Roman museum, though, was supposed to be fantastic: it won the award for European museum of the year in 2011.  And so, because Stefan knows that I like museums and I like Roman things, we paid a visit.

I have to say, it was one of the best museums of any kind I've ever seen.  They had artefacts dating way back into the Stone Age.  You know the type: slightly chipped rock that the label tells you is an arrowhead or an axehead or a flint, but you can't really see the difference between it and a normal rock.  They'd organized the whole museum by date, starting with the Stone Age and Neanderthal stuff and moving down to the fall of Rome, with plenty of very well-done life-size human figures (right down to the leg hair on the cavewoman).  Most of the displays had video screens next to them, showing, for example, demonstrations of someone making a stone tool or casting a bronze sword.  They had the usual little labels on everything, the kind of label that's only of interest to archaeologists and historians and such (findspot, material, approximate date, etc.), and larger text summarizing what was in each case, why it was important, and what it told us.  Plus -- and this is the question I get asked in museums more often than any other -- they had answers to "how do we know that?"  How do we know that the sword is from that time?  How do we know how old a bone is?  How do we know what something was used for?  It was a wonderful, wonderful museum.

The temporary exhibit -- Greek and Roman antiquities from Sagalassos, in Turkey -- was odd, though.  First, it was insanely busy.  Far too busy for the space, and not designed with good flow, either (especially compared to the rest of the museum).  Plus, they let modern artists loose with the antiquities, or something.  And I get that I like normal, traditional museums where the things are in glass cases with decent lighting, but in this exhibit, they wasted half the space making odd industrial modern art with pipes and very dim red lighting so that you couldn't really see the marble at all, and bizarre Pompeii ash-bodies that didn't really go with anything.  Not to my taste, really, although modern art generally isn't.  I prefer art that looks like things.

The photos are here.  I wish I could have gotten one more, as we crossed the border back into the Netherlands, but the bus was too fast and I didn't have my camera out.  In case you didn't know, the Netherlands is gradually changing the laws on the legalization of marijuana to reduce drug tourism, and as of May 1, they started rolling it out in the three southernmost provinces (and that includes Eindhoven).  Now, coffeeshops are members-only establishments, and you need proof of residence to get a membership.  And because we were travelling via Maastricht, right near the Belgian and German borders, there was a glowing sign as we crossed the border, in Dutch and French, explaining that the laws had now changed.  I particularly enjoyed that they decided to put up a sign informing people as they entered the country... it's just very Dutch.