Saturday, Dan and I met up in Utrecht, which is about 25 miles southeast of Amsterdam and is the home of Holland's largest university. The city is described as being similar to Amsterdam on a smaller scale. The canals are different because the water level is a lot lower than the street level, so restaurants and shops have opened up on the lower levels.
We spent the first hour walking around the city and through the markets that were set up outside the train station and along the canals.
We walked to the Dom tower, which is the tallest tower in Holland and also considered the largest musical instrument because it has over 50 bells inside. You can actually climb the steps to the top, but Dan and I voted against it. It was pretty cold out and close to noon... the bells were loud enough already and we were on the ground.
The interesting thing about the Domplein (Dom Square) is that there is all this space between the tower and the church (Domkerk) that actually is where the nave of the huge cathedral that connected the church and the tower once stood. It must have been one huge church! The middle of the church was destroyed by a freak tornado in 1674 and never rebuilt.
We went inside the
Dom Church... not as much stained glass as most of the churches we've seen. We were staring at this interesting statue on the wall when a woman who worked at the church came over to explain to us what had happened to it... apparently, during the Reformation (16th century), churches were not allowed to have statues with faces on them, so the faces on here were lopped off. Strange.
After the church, we grabbed some lunch at
Stadkasteel Oudaen, an old 13th century castle turned brewery on the Oudegracht (Old Canal) ... no pics of the place... I forgot. We tried the blond and wheat beers, which were both good.
Since we both have museumcards, we decided to hit up a few of the museums that allowed us free entry. You can buy a museumcard for 40 EUR (about $60) and it grants you access to over 400 museums throughout Holland... pretty good deal and nice because I wouldn't have gone to as many museums if I had to pay for them individually.
Our first stop was at the
Museum von Speelklok tot Pierement (National Music Box and Street Organ Museum). If you've ever been on the pedestrian shopping street in Amsterdam on a busy weekend, you've probably heard one of these street organs... really loud and a guy is usually standing nearby shaking a can full of coins asking for donations. I'm not a fan of these things.
We skipped the full tour and just tagged along at the end of another one so we could hear one of the organs played. They only play them on guided tours (otherwise the place would be crazy!) Luckily, they close the doors between each room in the musuem and the rooms are somewhat soundproofed. We walked through the place pretty quickly... street organs, regular organs, grandfather clocks, player pianos.
After that, we went to the University Museum, which has the history of different fields of sciences. I think this was definitely my favorite of the day (yep, I'm a geek!). It is set up in separate rooms with doors and you never know what you are going to walk into next. The first room we saw had a wide range of objects dealing with science throughout time... the first microscope, electricity, photography, preseving jellyfish in glass, evolution of horses, humane ways to slaughter animals for food... luckily, there was an English handout for this room.
The next room we went to really needed no handout... it was all medical stuff - skeletons, a variety of things preserved in jars like body parts, whole fetuses, animals. Pretty freaky stuff.
The next floor was dedicated to a temporary exhibit about personality and the five factors of personality. We read that you could take a personality test and learn more about yourself... but, unfortunately, everything in this exhibit was in Dutch with no English translations, so were out of luck. From what we could tell, it looked really cool. : (
They did have a table you could sit at and determine if you were made for someone else. It looked like there were only two buttons on each side of the table, though. But since it was in Dutch, I really have no idea how it worked.
Next floor was a kids room with hands-on type experiments dealing with the senses. The kids got to wear little white lab coats and pretend to be scientists. This was the nose section... a bunch of elephant trunks.
Then, there was a room with animals and some more things preserved in jars. Here's me next to a bunch of sea animals.
We were a little worried because they had these drawers you could pull open to see what was inside... lucky for us, they were all filled with nice things.
Last room we went into had opthamology and dental equipment throughout history. The dental equipment was a little much... Dan and I said we'd probably rather just have lost our teeth! Here is a nice collection of shots:
After the University Museum, we went to the Centraal Museum... again, a wide range of stuff in here. The place was arranged pretty strange with staircases and elevators and we somehow missed an entire floor on the way up, but "found" it on the way down. Some of the highlights... Petronella de la Court's Dollhouse from the 17th century. The rooms are all elaborately decorated and the paintings on the walls were miniatures painted by the famous 17th century artists themselves.
In the basement was a huge 10th century boat that they excavated from the bottom of a canal and restored. The boat was made from a hollowed out tree... must have been a huge tree!
There was also a room full of Roman artifacts... including dice! I had one of those "oops, let's get out of here fast" moments. When we were walking up one of the stairways, I was reading the map of the museum and not paying attention to the big case of artificats on the wall and smacked right into it. Killed my shoulder! I kept walking into the next room and Dan said everything in the case was still moving. I didn't hear anything break, though. DOH!
After the Centraal Musuem, we walked to the Spoorwegmuseum (Dutch Railway Museum).
They had a train up on rafters so you could see what it looked like from underneath. There was also a tank.
We walked into a room where everyone was waiting in line for some sort of ride. The sign on the wall was in Dutch, but it said something about people with heart problems and young children shouldn't ride this ride. You couldn't see what it was because you had to wait for a light to turn white and then you walked through a doorway into this room that looked dark with blacklights. Here is the only thing we saw...
Some woman saw that we were totally confused and told us you ride in a mining car and it's like a roller-coaster/haunted house. Dan hates spiders and I hate roller-coasters, so this oughta be fun. We figured kids go on this thing, so it can't be that bad. The light finally turned white and we went in the door and got into this little mining type car. The woman made sure we were all buckled up and we were on our way. It was a very weird ride. Most of it was pitch black, which I am not a fan of. We kept creaking slowly up and down little hills... nothing bad at all. Every once in a while something would pop out of a train near us, but we kept waiting for spiders or something big to jump out at us. There were a couple of times where they make you feel like you are going to crash with a train... pitch black and you see a speeding train's headlights coming at you and you are speeding up... as a kid, that would have given me nightmares. Then at some point you get to a wall and they spin you around and drop you down to the floor below. Then it just ended. We both said as kids it would have scared us... I was scared of everything as a kid, though.
Anyway, the bathrooms in the museum were strange and I took a pic (of course!). Dan said the men's was weird, too.
I was totally worn out after all that and went home and crashed at like 9:30. Yep, exciting Saturday night for me. : )
