I’m busy. And tired. And busy. And tired. Probably tired, because I’m busy. My mind is a bit all over the place. Work. Politics. Local, national and global. Life. Plans. Overwhelm. In a variety of ways. But then I also feel like I’m getting a handle on it and feel sort of cautiously optimistic. Or maybe I’m just kidding myself 🙂 I’m doing too many things at once that’s for sure. Some are unavoidable. Some might be just my means to deal with the overwhelm. Enough of this vague rambling.
At least I finally took the time to go through the rest of the Antwerp photos. It was gloomy most of the time, so I won’t share too many photos, because grey sky above grey buildings is depressing. I’ll go back to Antwerp next year for sure…
We did get some blue sky in between…
There are some interesting sculptures and statues in the city centre. Nello & Patrasche in front of the cathedral and then of course the Brabo fountain, which shows Roman hero Brabo throwing the hand he had cut off a giant. The “hand throwing” (hand – worpen in dutch) is the reason the city is called Antwerp.
The grey and gloomy sky was the reason I only share a night time photo of the outside of the cathedral. I went in after a long day of sightseeing, so I might not have been able to take it all in with the appreciation it deserves. It’s a vast space filled with typical cathedral stuff – stained glass windows, statues and all that. This one though also had a lot of paintings by Rubens.
We also went to this cool modern building – the MAS – Museum an de Stroom, which houses a variety of collections. We went up to the roof terrace. By escalator because we didn’t see the sign for the lift. There clearly needs to be better signage, because I’m sure we looked! We were tired! Escalators are fine of course, but it took ages. Look at the size of the building. But enough moaning, it was kind of cool.
Lyrics “Reasons Not to Be an Idiot” – Frank Turner, 2008
I’ve been back home from my last stint as “Travelling Fangirl” for a good week now and still haven’t shared any photos or stories. From the two Frank Turner gigs I went to or from the two cities I visited – Antwerp and Paris.
I was exhausted. I was back at work with lots of things to do. I had other stuff on my mind. Feeling a bit overwhelmed with work and life and everything. Catching up on sleep. Catching up on news and interesting articles to read. To be honest more collecting interesting articles to read with such speed and intensity that will make it difficult to catch up with it all.
Sharing all the photos and experiences from this wonderful trip still felt / feels overwhelming, because for some stupid, inexplicable reason I thought I had to share all of it all at once. I’m not good with feeling overwhelmed. It makes me feel inadequate and I shut down and then don’t do anything. Until I snap out of it and at least get ready to share something. I don’t have to do everything all at once and right away. Small steps.
Forgive the self-help babbling above.
So, Antwerp. We went there because Frank Turner played a show, but also because the city itself seemed interesting enough. And it was. So lovely and with so many interesting museums / buildings / churches to see. We only were there for a day and so of course were only able to scratch the surface. I do plan to spend a whole weekend or even a bit longer there next year – preferable in the spring / summer and not November.
Let’s start with my favourite (only to be honest) museum I visited that day. The Museum Plantin-Moreteus, which is a museum about the history of book-printing and within that also about cartography. As someone who loves maps and cartography and books and who is interested in the history of things I was in my absolute nerd heaven. Which I hadn’t even expected to be to be honest. I came back out with the impulse to find non-fiction history books on a variety of subjects, which I felt I don’t know enough about. I admit I haven’t gone searching for those books yet, but I might.
Here are the two things that made my nerd heart soar a bit in this museum, both came as a surprise.
Remember the days – 20 or so years ago – when more and more fonts became available in any kind of word processors or web design software? How many do you really know of, except Times New Roman, Arial and Comic Sans? Did or do you have favourite fonts?
I always had a thing for serif fonts. Not Times New Roman in particular, but others. Georgia is my favourite these days, I think. On this blog I use a font called Libre Baskerville. I must have had a thing for the Garamond font back in the day as well. At least I remember it well. So imagine my delight to see this little label on a wall next to a glass case:
Information on GaramondThe original Garamond matrices
How awesome is that? The mere idea that we are typing our thoughts in a typeface someone had thought of 400 hundred years ago?
The whole process of actually making the metal types being used for printing also was super interesting to read up on and see images off. How they standarized the types so that the letters are all spaced equally in a line / on a page and all that stuff.
The second piece on exhibition which blew my mind was the first ever atlas. Maps collected in one book. Sounds so simple these days. Well for us who learned their geography from maps hang on the wall in a school room and atlases and not through maps on a screen. No judgement for the latter, just a bit of nostalgia.
The first ever atlas
Abraham Ortelius had the idea to adjust the scale and format of maps to make them fit into one book. It wasn’t even called atlas then. They only came up with that term about 100 years later. And there it was the first ever collection of maps in one book. I did A level geography, so of course my mind was blown.
I could go on and on and on. I won’t, don’t worry. Just trust me that I had a great time and might come back to this place if I visit Antwerp next year again.
The lighting wasn’t always good enough to snap proper photos and I wondered about that and alsovabout health and safety on narrow old stairs and such until I saw this sign 🙂
That explains it….
Anyway here are a few more photos. For some reason I can’t get the gallery working the way I’d like. Maybe in my next post.
Courtyard of the private home – now museumA globe from… wheneverEven back then they needed copyeditingThey printed all kinds of languages and also sciency stuffNo idea from when that map was, I just impressed by the detailsPhilosopher Seneca
And yes, that painting is a Rubens. In a private home of a rich businessman back then. Because, why not?
I want to leave Twitter. I’m working on it. I haven’t been using it all that much anymore anyway. At the moment I have a Twitter list of about 45 people I check daily (or sometimes more than once a day to be honest). The list includes people I’m friends with or people in the public sphere, who still use Twitter to share any kind of information I might be interested in. I’m a fangirl, as you know. Sometimes I check the “following” tab on Twitter and on even rarer occasions I have a look at the “for you” tab. I admit that when I do I’m then still too often sucked into the “watching the car-crash of social media” doom scroll. And that’s such a waste of time.
For November I paid a few Euros to use a recommended “Tweetdelete” app/service to delete all the tweets, which I posted after I had already once deleted my tweets when I had planned to leave Twitter the first time after Musk two years ago. That service is still running to delete all the likes I left over the years. In the future I plan to delete tweets older than a few weeks in regular intervals, if I tweet at all. At the moment I still share links to the blog there, but I might stop doing that as well, so there won’t be many tweets left after all.
When I left Twitter the first time I signed up on Mastodon, and while I still follow quite a lot of people there – again similar selection and technique (lists) as on Twitter – I never really got into it all that much. Maybe it was too many accounts right away?
Once they were established, I signed up with “Bluesky” and “Threads” as well, but to be honest just to make sure no-one else would take over my username. After that I just let the accounts lay dormant. This morning, I put bookmarks to both of them into my “social media” browser on my tablet and my phone, because I did consider using both or either of them a bit more in the future. Phasing out of Twitter, getting into something else?
After half a day of reading messages on both I’m not too keen on either to be honest.
I don’t know… maybe my time for social networks has run its course?
Maybe I’m also just in a weird mood, because yesterday I spent almost 10 lively hours with about 50 real people in real life in one room to catch up on the last few years / decades, in which we haven’t seen each other. It was fun and cool and interesting and left me with lots and lots of thoughts on a variety of issues. Personal thoughts about myself and my life, but also thoughts about society and life and politics and everything that sparks a conversation when 50 people from a variety of backgrounds come together. Being social in the core meaning of the term, I guess.
My voice has gone a bit, because I was obviously talking so much and because all the social chatter around us made us raise our voices from time to time. I’m glad I don’t have to talk to anyone today and not all that much in the next two days as I’m going to be working from home. From Wednesday on I’ll be a travelling fangirl once more and I hope my voice will have recovered a bit till the gig on Thursday.
