After Ghent, we didn’t go anywhere for like a week. There were certainly more touristy things to do in the Low Countries, but like I said before, my main objective was not to be a tourist. But we did discuss things we could see in the future, such as the Maastricht Natural History Museum, in relation to which I learned that the mosasaur is named after the Meuse (Maas) River which was absolutely shocking to me. Also shocking is the controversial history of the first mosasaur skull ever discovered, which French soldiers yoinked in 1794 and the French government has refused to return ever since, citing that someone was paid (though those circumstances are, from what I understand, dubious). Another place might be the historic pump Museum de Cruquius, the largest steam engine in the world, apparently.
So we read books, played games, listened to music, and cooked food, drank alcohol with the food occasionally. We watched the birds at the bird feeders in the mornings, Tharash has four bird feeders on his deck as well as a water dish. I did not get much creative writing done. That’s fine, I was in rest mode.
The games we played were mostly these: First there’s Sun Haven, a multiplayer cozy-farming sim which seems strongly inspired by Stardew Valley but made by a team instead of just one single person (tbh I still like Stardew Valley better because it’s simpler, and I like the tone better than Sun Haven). We played a bit with Yllamse and Crim, even, but Tharash and I also have our own farm that’s just us. I also played some of 9 Years of Shadows, a game which Tharash gave to me as a gift; it’s a beautifully coloured metroidvania action platformer that is decently challenging without being overwhelming. Sometimes Tharash played Icewind Dale, a really oldschool RPG that is mostly combat and very little conversation. And we continued playing Divinity: Original Sin, a game which we have attempted to beat at least twice before and always got stuck after a certain point. We are past that point now, by virtue of playing on easy mode.
Some of the visitors to his birdfeeders. There’s a jackdaw on the railing, but you can see the bully pigeon hogging the food bowl. It doesn’t mind the sparrows so much, but you can see a ring-necked dove in the back waiting for its chance.
The owl that Tharash bought in Ghent!
We were looking at the Tasting History cookbook together, and the French onion soup sounded good, but then we went online to check something and modern French onion soup sounded even better so we made that. With Gouda on the toasts.
Sunrise
We went for a walk in a nearby nature park; it’s a former timber farm that was only converted relatively recently, so all the older trees are in straight rows.
There were many types of trees, including Douglas firs from Canada in another section, and quite a few information signs (I temporarily learned a few things, but now I have forgotten them again)
Some gnarly-looking mushrooms
This time we did make something from the Tasting History cookbook: Stuffed Tomatoes! We left out the prosciutto to make it vegetarian. But there was a lot of leftover tomato and egg and herbs, so we turned that into an omelette.
It might not look that great but it was tasty
These were fantastic, even though a couple of them exploded. The fresh mozzarella is really great.
Mending party. For some reason the right knee of his pants rips before the left one.
New Year’s Eve tourtiere, which is a French-Canadian tradition but it’s delicious anyway. We made ours vegetarian, substituting red lentils and vegan mincemeat for the regular meat. I was expecting Tharash to use a pre-made frozen pie shell since that’s what we do at home, but he was using puff pastry sheets instead.
New Year’s Eve is a special occasion so it’s time for the special occasion Brothers of Metal hoodie.
All done, with steamed broccoli!
Put maple syrup cream on top and it’s even more delicious.
It was super rainy out but the people in the next street decided they had to let off fireworks anyway. Tharash’s parents had gone to a small seaside village to try and avoid the worst of the fireworks in the city, but there were still fireworks there too.
We went on one last tourist visit just before I went back home, to Utrecht.
I found these Christmas lights to be a bit odd.
Utrecht Central is graceful in a modern way, like an airport.
You go out the door, through a terribly elaborate shopping mall that is built right over a canal (I’d come back to shop there! Not least because there’s a Lego store; I bought a Lego Baby Yoda keychain), and then you’re in the old city. Urbanism ftw!! There are a lot of clothing/fashion stores in this area, with a smattering of fries, soap, and souvenirs shops in between.
The Domtoren (Cathedral Tower) is currently under renovations that have apparently been direly needed for decades if not centuries. It’s quite the landmark!
Our main place of interest was the Museum Speelklok, a museum located within a converted church. It is filled with music boxes, musical clocks, street organs, and dancehall organs. Basically if it made sound in an automatic fashion, it was welcome in that museum.
The pipe organ of the church.
Some street organs in the central hall. They have guided tours like every 15 minutes, in both Dutch and English (the guide switches back and forth every sentence), and the guide would play some of the instruments (not all of them, but enough) so we hung around for 5 minutes for the next tour.
A carillon.
This was one that was demonstrated, maybe you can see which parts of the painting are actually moveable. The string on the right is how it’s activated on command (instead of waiting for the hour to strike). The picture is a bit blurry because I was near the back of the crowd, there were naturally a lot of children there.
A li’l bunny (made from real rabbit fur) who slowly rises out of a cabbage (paper-mache and cotton), snuffles a bit, and then…
…pops back into the cabbage. He also demonstrated the wind-up puppet in the background, an acrobat who will slowly do a handstand on a ladder.
In between the first room of clocks and the last room of dancehall organs, there was a smaller room with some street organs. He let one of the kids play a little street organ to demonstrate the musical punchcard system, and then asked one of the adults to play a bigger street organ. Apparently you need strong arms to keep it going at a steady pace for any length of time! I took some video recordings, but I’d like to edit them before posting. In any case, the punchcards contained Christmas songs because it was still January 3rd.
An entire room filled with dance-hall organs. There are even a couple more that you can’t see on the left.
This sounds like a monster. Can you imagine having this in your house? Thank goodness for modern sound systems.
This one is a rare design that incorporates violins, like a reverse hurdy-gurdy. How do you keep it in tune??
The bent pipes in this one are very stylish.
That is a lot of notes. I wonder, if an alien saw this with no context, what they would think. Clearly it contains information, but would they figure out it’s not language?
There was a toddler who LOVED this particular organ, kept crawling up to it to hear it better. Their dad came to hang on to them and make sure they didn’t start climbing on anything, but it was really cute. XD
So big I had to panorama.
I like the gradients on this one.
Another room had an activity area for children to play with the different ways that music boxes made sound, whether from hitting things, plucking things, or blowing through things. It was a very noisy room. But there was also this tiny organ.
I love this clock! Description in the next image.
I love this musicbox/sewing kit (?)/piano, even if the piano has four pedals for some reason.
This is the museum’s pride and joy, a huge expensive toy commissioned for someone very important and then abandoned. It was acquired in perfect condition.
Unknown pieces?????
The mechanism for the carillon, on the second level.
The carillon bells
A music box commission for a pub; the king is “Gambrinus, a legendary Flemish king who supposedly invented beer”.
A toy player piano for children. I feel this defeats the purpose of giving a musical instrument to a child; wouldn’t it be more fun for them to play themselves?
Boxes and boxes of music rolls, and a model street organ.
A historic part of the church: “The Tree of Jesse”, painted by “The Master of Evert van Soudenbalch”, second half of the 15th century.
It’s so easy to forget the building was built as a church most of the time.
Organ!! Interesting that a number of the stops are up top. Also kind of an awkward place to play from, I would think? It’s on the side of the case.
That’s a goodly number of stops, anyway. There is a narrow passage behind the organ so you can get to the other side of the balcony exhibits.
A small chamber was set up to appear as an organ workshop, including a machine for the purpose of making the punchcards.
Then there was a bit of the museum that I guess is for temporary exhibits, there was a lot of stuff about environmentalism?? It didn’t really seem to fit. Anyway this textile sculpture map is neat.
Another organ.
The highest part (because the dancehall is underneath)
Very cute! Description in the next image.
This was one that was demonstrated earlier on the tour, I went back specifically to get a better picture of it. It’s quite lovely by itself, but the birds flutter and chirp, and the ship heaves up and down when the hour strikes. The birds are kind of hard to see when not moving, I wonder if they used to be brighter when it was new.
Then we left the museum, and proceeded on a short walking tour of the old city.
Domtoren again, but we didn’t go through the tunnel yet.
The sun came out for two minutes!
Wait there are some shops that have canal-side entrances/patios?? That’s so cool!!
There is a statue of a young woman on a horse; it is a source of vague amusement to me that she is currently in the middle of a construction bit.
Big Christmas wreath there. I didn’t get other good photographs of this stretch, but it seems that it’s a popular place. The curving canal is very distinctive.
The back of the cathedral
As we learned in Leiden, Utrecht was once a Roman fort. They’ve located the Roman bit (how, without disturbing the modern city, I’m not sure).
This line marks the Roman fort wall, but it’s also a map of some kind.
There are still guided tours available to go up the tower, but I decided it would be better to come back another year. There were some other tours of underground ruins at the DOMunder, but they were all booked up.
They just walled off the end of the cathedral, just like that, after it got broken. I’d wanted to see what this looked like since I first heard about it in 2012.
You can see the bricks on the ground suggesting where the cathedral used to be.
The construction walls had this great history lesson
We stopped in at a small restaurant close by called Bar Restaurant Walden, and we started with hot chocolate because it was rather cold that day. Obviously I got whipped cream, I’m still on vacation. For food I had a ‘Vegan Rendang Sandwich” – ‘rendang’ is an Indonesian food – and it was… strange to me? Tharash had a smoked salmon sandwich. The contents were piled so high on the bun it was hard to eat.
This is apparently the Utrecht University Hall.
So we went in the cathedral next.
That looks heavy.
I’ve never seen an organ case this gothic before.
I realized I needed to nip back a few steps and take a picture of this skeleton.
This is called Jelling Stone, and is a Danish runestone that was gifted to the University for its 300th anniversary.
We went into the garden attached to the cathedral, and the guide sign pointed out this bit in the corner that’s been carved to look like it’s being held together with rope. Cute.
After that, we certainly had not exhausted the sights of Utrecht, but we were getting tired and ready to head on, so we went and got our luggage and got on the train to Amsterdam Centraal. In Centraal, we stopped at a Mexican fast food chain to get burritos for dinner; Tharash got one that had every single topping and could barely close; he suggested that I, with my smaller appetite, get one without rice and beans. I don’t think he was expecting me to only get like 2 toppings, which meant that altogether mine was about a quarter of the size of his. XD It was still tasty, though, when we got to his parents’ place to eat them.
His parents were still in the seaside village, so we had the house to ourselves for the evening. So we played Wingspan. I’ve played the Tabletop Simulator version once before, but his parents have the actual tabletop boardgame. Thanks to him helping me a couple times, I didn’t lose by too much! Then we went to bed early because even though AMS-TOR planes don’t leave until noon, and Schiphol is one of the breeziest international airports to go through security-wise, I still wanted to be there earlier rather than later.
Fun things at breakfast; I knew I was going to be too stressed to eat very much early in the morning, so I decided to have some crackers. We found a package of crackers in the back of the cupboard, and… they were covered in little bugs which I didn’t notice until I’d already taken a nibble. Oops! Luckily there was a new package of crackers next to it, still sealed tight.
The crowds at Schiphol were wayyy less than in the summer. It was actually quite pleasant. And I bought the seasonal Tony’s Chocolonely bars, which were designed to potentially be used as Christmas ornaments, though it didn’t actually work that well when I tried it. I got a granola yogurt for real breakfast, and waited for my plane.
I think this is an exhaustive list of all the plants and animals found on Schiphol grounds. Not sure, though.
The clouds were very dramatic.
Since I was in a window seat, I got to see (and play with, a bit) the polarization! It’s weird to look out and see the sun (not visible in this picture) seeming to be so far away.
With this level of filtering, Quebec/Ontario looks like an alien planet.
A river, getting close to Toronto.
I found some overpriced poké in Toronto, and ate it as quickly as I could (maybe too quickly); I heard someone coughing near me. Then I had to wait for 6 hours for my next plane to arrive; I spent the time mostly in reading. I tried to read on the plane as well, in between watching The Iron Giant and Song of the Sea (both movies that make me cry, but wearing a mask helps with that!). On arrival, I had managed to keep all my luggage with me the whole time so I just walked off the plane and met my ride home!