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20 May 2007

School trip from hell

If you grew up in the States, surely you remember taking a big yellow school bus on field trips. Do you have fond memories of those school trips?

I do. I remember in upstate New York, we'd often go on school trips, to museums and other places. I remember it being fun, and interesting.

I just returned from a school trip of sorts. As I'm getting a Master's degree in art history, our class went to Amsterdam to smoke pot visit art museums.

If there's one main complaint I have about the whole school/program, it's the blatant disorganization. It's the vague and subtle way in which the British have of communicating information. It drives me insane. And this school trip was no different. The entire schedule was inefficient, thanks to our lazy prof.

The trip had this overall hurry-up-and-wait theme and meanwhile some of us were sweating bullets, thinking our time would much better be spent working on our dissertations. It was downright irresponsible of said lazy prof to schedule this field trip three weeks before our dissertations are due. We could have, like other classes, taken our school trip in January, before the second semester even began.

Our focus was seventeenth century art and clothing. When we went to The Hague, we saw the above painting (Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, c. 1665), amongst others. I was the only one in my class who took advantage of the free audio guide at the museum, which was so useful. I quickly learned, though, that art history students really look down upon those who listen to audio guides. I don't really care, though. I learned more from that audio guide than I did from my own professor, who was with us the whole trip.

Outside of Amsterdam, we traveled to the royal palace of Het Loo which is basically a little Versailles. To get to the front gate, we had to walk a long way under a canopy of leaves, and it was raining that sort of misty rain.

Granted, only half of our class was walking in the misty rain. The other half missed the specified train! Shocking!

The very best part of the whole school trip (aside, of course, from meeting the Amsterdam knitters) was when the hunky royal gardener took us up to the rooftop for an aerial view of the seventeenth century gardens. This view was a privilege.

It was really neat walking around the rooftop, and the eventual long traipse down the wooden staircase to the ground.

What looks like a big hedge on the right is actually a "treehouse" or fortified pergola.

Apparently, the queen and her ladies-in-waiting would play hide-and-seek inside the pergola on hot summer days, so as to avoid the sunshine and possible tanning. It was a little creepy entering it, though.

Inside the treehouse, it was spooky and chilly.

Our class was in Amsterdam for four nights. It could have been a fun and memorable trip. But, unfortunately, it wasn't. It was the longest trip of my life. Even though our entire class consists of only seven gals, including me, it is nonetheless extremely clique-y, with certain gals disliking others. So, it got a little weird, real fast, us all being trapped together. It's a sad reality. I'm sure that the whole school trip would have been a lot more fun had my fellow classmates been avid knitters.

So, on the fifth day, we all dispersed. I thankfully fled back to Brussels, where my friend lives. Brussels is like night and day compared to Amsterdam, and it was a nice respite from the school trip.

This is a shot from the grand square in Brussels.