This weekend we took a train to Rotterdam. We decided to spend a day there, as our Canadian friends Peter and Lisa were coming up from Bruges in Belgium, which was the last stop on their cycling holiday. Before meeting them and after coffee the three of us strolled to and through Museumpark and visited the Depot of the Boijmans van Beuningen museum. The museum itself is closed a decade or longer for renovations to their 19th century building. Next door a new depot was built, which is a unique feat of architecture: a large mirrored bowl reflecting the full Rotterdam skyline, with a tree park on the roof. The depot is open to the public, with temporary expositions, and guided tours of the actual storage spaces for a dozen or so people at a time. Pixel Pioneers was the title of the temporary exhibition, featuring early digital game designs, digital art, and a special focus on the works of Geert Mul. Het already started exploring media art before the web, treating collections of images as databases and working with the patterns across them. We previously saw some of his work at Dutch Design Week I think. The Depot’s rooftop park is a thing worth seeing in itself, and we had drinks and a snack there.

The Depot building reflecting the Rotterdam skyline.

By then Peter and Lisa had reached Rotterdam too, and we met up at café Heilige Boontjes for a drink, and exchanging small gifts, before finding a place to eat in the Witte de Withstraat. We were early for dinner, it was a school night for Y after all, so had no trouble finding a spot. It was great to see Y talk with Peter in and play a game of hangman with Lisa, both in English. She had practiced her English before our trip to Portugal earlier this month, because she wanted to be able to converse with our hosts Bev and Etienne, and made good use of the experience she gained now.

Continuing our conversations we walked back to Rotterdam central station where Peter and Lisa fetched their luggage and we took a train home.

It is a bit surreal to meet friends from across the Atlantic for just a few hours. By definition that seems too short to due justice to the scarcity of such meetings and the geographic distance involved. At the same time it is also somewhat miraculous that such connections and meetings even exist at all, a triumph for blogging as Wouter characterized his own lunch last week with Peter and Lisa. Indeed every in-person meeting since Peter and I first met in 2005 was carried by all our blogging in between that preserves shared context. Within that 20+ years of shared context it makes perfect sense to meet even if only briefly, whenever the opportunity arises.