It’s a thrill to be able to travel abroad and seek out a museum with certain specific exhibits in mind. In a whirlwind of new information, simple name recognition goes a long way.

This afternoon, we visited Prague’s cavernous National Gallery to experience two installations that opened the 2017 season back in March: Ai Weiwei’s meditation on our global refugee crisis, “Law of the Journey,” and Brian Eno’s visual phantom “The Ship,” which encourages viewers to immerse themselves in an aural landscape and project the visual component from their own imaginations. The National Gallery building in which these works are housed is huge: five stark industrial floors of myriad works representing different countries, periods, and degrees of establishment within the field; we have works by Gustav Klimt on one level, and a show by graduating art students on another. Our students roamed from end to end, taking in the stuff we came for, and appreciating the surprises in between.