Asian galleries at the ROM
museums
At the ROM with Eric
Gardiner Museum
First visit to the Gardiner ceramics museum in Toronto. Every 3rd Friday is free!
Here are some of my favourite objects:
The Tom Thomson
From today’s visit to the Tom Thomson Art Gallery:
The day we met dinosaurs
Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent
(DAY 6)
I could have spent all day at the Museum Voor Schone Kunsten. The museum’s website has a nice showcase of its collection in English. My favourites were Hieronymous Bosch, Jules de Bruycker, and the Expressionist stuff.
Afterwards, we crossed the street and spent maybe half an hour at S.M.A.K. (the museum of contemporary art) and then headed back to the hotel for a break before dinner.
Gravensteen
(DAY 6)
We started our second day in Ghent by visiting Gravensteen or “Castle of the Counts”.
Just when you’ve fallen completely in love with everything medieval– the stonework, the hundreds of spiraling steps, the arched windows, turrets, stained glass… just when you start thinking, Oh I wish I could’ve lived back then! Maybe I should take up archery?… Bam, there it is: the Museum of Torture Instruments. Oh yeah: hot iron. Not to mention the cold castle latrine…
Design Museum
(DAY 5)
With a brilliant museum pass, we got access to all the big museums of Ghent and unlimited rides on the city tram for three days. Our first stop was the Design Museum which had 17th and 18th century interiors on the main level and then Art Nouveau and Art Deco stuff upstairs, plus some weird stuff from the 60s-70s-80s. What made it even more fun were the plastic figurines hidden in the displays– part of a treasure hunt for kids. Wish I’d grabbed a paper for myself!
Museum of Education
(DAY 4)
In the morning before our guided tour, we wandered around the streets of Ypres and paid a short visit to the Museum of Education. A quote from the tourism website:
This museum is housed in the former Saint Nicholas church, a unique Construction in Flanders. The Municipal Museum of Education outlines the history of education in Flanders from the middle ages to the present day.
Ypres Salient Tour: The Trenches
DAY 4: Guided Tour of Ypres Salient (part 1)
On our second day in Ypres, we took a guided tour of WWI battlefields and memorials. At Hill 62, we saw the British frontline trenches at Sanctuary Wood. There was a one-room museum there as well, but we didn’t stay long as this was our group’s last stop.
