A couple of weeks ago I attended the TARK conference in Brussels. I didn’t have heaps of time wandering the city, but I did snap a few things I found noteworthy. The rest of the post is heavy on pics and light on commentary.
Amsterdam gets bad press for drug tourism, but check this out:
One thing they’re serious about, that’s bilingualism. Sometimes it takes some effort:
… and sometimes it’s a bit more voor-de-hand-liggend:1
At the station we were disturbed to see the headquarters of the International Liquidation Trade, although closer investigation showed that they had gone out of business.
Some pretty outstanding graffiti, in a tiny alleyway I found myself in twice on consecutive days after getting lost between my hostel and the conference venue:
And there does seem to be a latent Belgian genius in the graphic arts (although judging by the smell the natural audience didn’t appreciate the work):
I spent a couple of hours at the Musical Instrument Museum, but unfortunately almost none of the photos worked out — no flash, combined with glass cases in darkened rooms, combined with my nervous assumption that if the attendants caught me they wouldn’t be impressed… Anyway, two of the more extravagant pieces that were well-lit are the following:
Notes:
- Lit. “lying-in-front-of-the-hand”, another of those nice phrases that we can only approximate in English. [↪]
2 Comments
Ad [1]: so how would you characterize the difference with `obvious’?
My feeling for the Dutch (which could be wrong, obviously) is that it combines En. ‘obvious’ with ‘easy’ or ’simple’ in a particular way, which I don’t think I can match in English.
On more solid ground, there’s certainly nothing in English with a comparable meaning that also wears its etymological heart on its sleeve (so to speak) in the same way. We’ve got “right in front of your nose” and “under your nose” and similar, but (meaning differences aside) you can’t treat them the same way grammatically.
(I’m now wondering whether ‘eenvoudig’ would have been a better choice — ’simple’ probably comes closest in English to what I’m trying for.)
And yes, I’m aware this isn’t a characterisation. And wow, what an incredible job translators do!