A few weeks ago I went to see the Balenciaga in Black exhibit at the Kunstmuseum in Den Haag. It is perhaps hard to describe what it feels like to be in face to face with such beauty. The shapes. The draping. For a brief moment I felt outraged that I had missed seeing this work up close, that for so long I lived somewhere where accessing this would have required paperwork and money and paperwork and money and flights. What else have I missed?

I left the exhibit and did the worst possible thing, which was to try and go shopping. Not one thing seems nice, let alone beautiful, once you've seen stunning craft up close and are instead confronted by the grim reality of too many clothes churned out by a system that keeps creating without thought.

(utterly obsessed with this cape! Cristobal Balenciaga!)

Instead I went and ate truffle and kimchi covered fries from Atelier Frites; another work of art in a city full of frietjes and art.

This past Saturday afternoon, I finally saw The Goldfinch — the painting, yes — at the Mauritshuis in Den Haag. (The museum has been in the news recently because of the Just Stop Oil / Girl with a Pearl Earring protest. There was *a lot* of security.) The painter, Carel Fabritius, died after being injured in a gunpowder explosion in Delft, which I only learned about when walking around Delft one day.

I read Donna Tartt's namesake novel years ago on a long layover in a dreary airport, but it was when I saw the film that after a long, long time, I had a visual reminder of the early days of grief, how you hold onto objects, how time doesn't pass by at all and then all too soon, you're somehow an adult, of the various ways adults treat you as if you're their age when you're a grieving child.

But what is striking about suddenly being in a place where this, this piece of art that came to you in a book, can suddenly come to life. I am constantly finding this part of living here absolutely surreal. There's a bit in Sally Rooney's Normal People when Connell suddenly, because of his scholarship, can now travel through Europe and go to museums and experience art and doesn’t quite believe it. Sometimes that's how I feel. It's not about the better standard of life; things that I could certainly recreate anywhere else as someone extremely privileged, or didn't need to, because privilege meant that those things were unquestioned or granted without thought or always available to me. For me, the experience of being here is about suddenly having the ability to see something in a magazine and then coming face to face with museum-worthy couture, a piece of history, a painting that you only know from a novel, a sudden fact that you've never heard before, suddenly, the book you've heard about is right there, in a store, the painting is a tram ride away. It is stunning how suddenly the world opens up to you, and how starkly you're reminded of how much beauty has been stripped away — or was missing? — from your life.