I finally completed it! The 1,000 piece puzzle Marco gave me for Christmas. It’s an 1,000 piece puzzle of M. C. Escher’s “Day and night”.
On the one hand, it was quite challenging. On the other hand, most of the pieces were subtly different. I was only left with about 15-20 black pieces in the upper right at the end. I was reduced to sticking in random pieces in each slot until something worked.
As you can see, it’s one of his famous works inspired by geometry – a city in daylight on the left, and the same city at night on the right. It’s quite beautiful, really. When I looked up a relevant Wikipedia article I found a picture of the Escher museum in The Hague with a poster of “Day and night” outside.
Of course I finished the bottom part rather quickly, and then it sat there for 6 months while I ignored it… But once I got motivated again it went rather quickly.
And now for something completely different: last week there was a secret fireworks event at Scheveningen (omroepwest.nl in Dutch), complete with drones! Note: the second video in the article with the grey box doesn’t work. Apparently the video was pulled from YouTube. But the article does have a few pictures and links to a few shorter videos.
The fireworks show was in celebration of 75 years of freedom since WW2 and was organized by the International Fireworks festival of Scheveningen (official site in Dutch). This was especially important because the show was cancelled in 2019 due to overcrowding concerns. And when I mean overcrowding, I mean overcrowding. Check out this photo from denhaagcentral.net in 2018. Roger, Marco and I went in 2015. It was a nightmare getting home…
Oh, and to show us why we can’t have nice things check out this article in Dutch over at omroepwest.nl: the city is in trouble because they paid 134,000 euros for a fireworks show that wouldn’t be seen by many people due to the corona issues. Opps.
Life in the Hague 