Eliot's Travels

After the flower auction, we continued our route north toward Zaandam. We were to spend the rest of the day at Zaanse Schans which has an open air museum with an old village and working windmills. Zaanse Schans is on the Zaan River. We saw dramatic pleasure boats and beautiful green and white houses along the river opposite the museum. The site itself contained a typical village from the 17th & 18th centuries with quaint little houses surrounded by canals and fields of animals. This little goat found a fine place to hang out! One uniqueness at this museum is the people working in the shops and the windmills actually live here. They aren't dressed in period dress but live and work here as their profession.


This was the first place we really saw groups of foreign tourists. Although it was not incredibly busy (it could have to do with the fact that it was over 90 deg F), we did get our fair share of jostling by two different Asian tour groups. One Korean tourist just picked up Miles to pose for a picture. Luckily Miles was OK with it. I suppose they thought we were Dutch.

John and the boys pose on the bridge leading to the cheese farm. The main things to see were windmills and workshops, but there were also a few noteworthy museums. Albert Heijn (a Dutch grocery chain) had an old grocery shop (like the Olsens on Little House on the Prairie). We went in another museum that displayed the bedroom and dining room of a typical house in the 17th century. We saw another box bed - a whopping 1.68 m long; apparently back then they used to sleep sitting up. The bed contained a nursing mother wearing a special drape while she nursed in the bed. On the table were some pastries given at the birth of a child - a sweet puff with a bitter biscuit- symbolizing life's ups and downs. Poetic, I thought.

The Museum van het Nederlandse Uurwerk - the museum of the Dutch clock - was a lovely and surprisingly extensive museum on clocks. The Dutch along with the English really created the first clocks as we know them today, probably becasue they were so important for their explorations and maritine travels during the Golden Age. This is the 350th anniversary of the pendulum! John and Mary checked it out first. Then I decided to go in while Miles continued his nap in the stroller. After asking Eliot 2 other times, he finally wanted to go in - it was the pendulum presented as a woman on a swing that finally got him to go in.

The owner/collector really liked children, so Eliot and I got the grand tour. We saw many fantastic things:
* Small version of a church carillion - playing twinkle twinkle little star.
* 1520 clock that used cannonballs as the weights for the ring and the tick; it had an adjustment for the hour length since the daylight hours were divided by 12 to determine the length of a daylight hour.
* Listened to the chime and tinkling songs of a beautiful 1765 clock with the month, day, moon phases on the clock face; it was one of the first clocks to have a second hand.
* Egyptian water clock - bowl that released water at a steady rate.
* Chinese dragon clock that burned a long incense stick; each hour the stick burned through the strings holding steel balls that would ding when they fell into the dish.
* Clock that had moving arms for the cello and harp when the clock played it's music, like the actors were playing for us.

posted by Whitney @ 11:11 AM