I walked from my really well situated hotel in the ‘Museumquartier’….down a neighbouring street Pieter Cornelitz Hoofstraat…what an amazing collection of high end boutique stores….Tiffany and Co, Hermes, Dior, Bvlgari, Prada – you get the gist. (He was a Dutch historian, poet and playwright in the late 19thC). As I got to the end of the street, saw this amazing building with decorative figures.

My first bridge with a view of canal boat cruises….looking like a great morning, but pretty soon after, the weather changed to grey and drizzly…..argh!

Next to ‘Foam’, an international photography museum, with a mission to make photography accessible to everyone. Loved the British photographer, Martin Parr (1952-2025) exhibition…titled ‘Very Modern and Rather Ugly’…he’s celebrated for his ability to make the familiar look strange and the boring interesting. Themes of consumption, cultural identity, tourism and class are central to his works. He was an amused observer of contemporary society. His works make me either cringe or laugh out loud.

A very searing exhibition of Julia Kochetova’s ‘ War is Personal’ images. She’s a Ukrainian photographer and documentary maker – she makes the personal realities of conflict tangible and confronts you with questions about memory, survival, and the meaning of home as conflict persist. Every story carries a name, a face, a body. As you first walk into the space, you get the read this…

Funeral of 2 year old Anhelina Halych (she was killed with her mother Nadia in the same attack).

Iryna Tsybykh was a combat medic and a close friend of Julia’s. She was killed in the Khariv region on 29/5/24, days before her 24th birthday.

I had already booked a canal cruise, so off I trudged, hoping we didn’t get any rain. And managed to jinx myself as the drizzle started. Arrh! Still, we were in an enclosed boat (unlike some others) and I was looking forward to seeing 17th century buildings lining the canals and gorgeous bridges glide by. Check out the tiniest house along the canal, and the iconic ‘dancing houses’, built on wooden poles driven through soft peat into sand and now subsiding.