Follow The Yellow Brick Road

...but first, Spring has sprung!

March came in like a lion and is going out like a lamb, as the saying goes.
And that's what my post is about on Vision and Verb today.
(Don't worry. I'll remind you again later.)

Now, follow these dots. This is fun!

You may remember Ernie and his delightful dog, Laika, who somehow always manage to enter my scene, as they did on this past Santa Run here. The image to the left is from 23 March a year ago when I first bumped into him on one of my citadel walks. Nine months later, when he saw me at the Santa Run, he asked if I'd send him the pictures I took back then. But my bad! I totally forgot until last Tuesday when, because of a citadel-walk post I was working on, I remembered and sent them to him. That's when he wrote back to tell me he had just won the prize for a photo contest related to our nearby Merwede Bridge celebrating its 50th-year anniversary....and that the next day, Wednesday, would be the official opening of the exhibition in the museum at our nearby Old Stadhuis. AND as a bonus, kids would be there in the afternoon building their rendition of bridges out of Legos.

The photo of the bridge above is the winning photo of all the 65+ entries here. Are you still following the dots?

So with one day's notice, I knew I'd want to go check it all out, in honor of my photographer friend and in hopes of some good photos of the kids building bridges out of Legos.

Here's the Old Stadhuis (below), not to be confused with the NEW Stadhuis (scroll down a bit) where all official city-hall business now takes place, including where we got married a year ago.

See the crooked Grote Kerk on the left (above)? It really IS that crooked and sits behind the Old Stadhuis on the market square 2 blocks from our house.

Now, look at this below from last Wednesday when I went to follow the yellow-brick Lego road:


As you see, since the building now houses the city's museum, it has delightful clay 'munchins' welcoming all who pass by. Because I was inside the museum that day (for my first time ever), I was able to take pictures looking out from their perspective.

Incidentally, in the top-right image above, the Old Stadhuis now houses a café/restaurant where we chose to eat our wedding dinner back on 5 February a year ago. We got married in the New Stadhuis and ate dinner in the Old. It made sense to us!

Now, come with me inside for this delightful hour of kids playing with Legos (bringing back so many memories of all those Lego sets we bought for son Mark over the years):

The orange banners outside say Brickshop.nl. This isn't the first time I've seen a big deal made out of Legos here in Holland. Is it a bigger deal than in America, I wonder?


As soon as I walked through the front door of the Stadhuis and turned left there in the lobby, I saw this table in the corner, loaded with bridge-building potential.
As you see, bridge-builder wannabes come in all shapes and sizes...and ages.

That was downstairs, but I wanted to check out the museum upstairs since it's free to the public on Wednesday afternoons and I had not yet seen it. What I didn't expect was...

...another table set up there, too!
Because it was smaller and not as crowded, I spent most of my time there.


Don't you get the impression these are the Dutch geeks engineers of tomorrow!


Do you anticipate what I'm going to say about the above collage?
I just LOVE the juxtaposition of serious play against the backdrop of Dutch-Master paintings!


I also love how the boys often worked together, side by side...


...as much as alone.
I loved watching this GAASTRA boy crouch low to get a different perspective of his work.
GAASTRA. Did you notice the name? It's the nautical brand of clothing with the Sneek waterpoort logo, as seen in this post.


My favorite of them all, certainly not older than 3-4!
I wish I had gotten his name...for future reference, assuming I live so long.

All the dots. The yellow brick road.

Just like that, from meeting Ernie and Laika a year ago, sharing our love of camera art...to serendipitous, chance meetings and fun photo ops.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Folks.

Addendum: Astrid just found this YouTube of the official ceremony where you can see the kids winning their bridge prizes (one for a lttle girl and one for a boy). Also, Ernie's winning photo is being hung at the end:

**********
Just another reminder that it's my turn again at Vision and Verb.
Spring has sprung!