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!

GOUDA, as in The City

So, after we left the cheese shop, loaded with our bag of cheese from the last post...we continued our photo hunt of Gouda, the city of 71K inhabitants. Actually, it took us two seconds to figure out we could leave the bag at the shop and come back for it later. Which we did.

Gouda the city is surely most known for its cheese. Duh. But it's also known for its clay smoking pipes with looong stems, stroop/syrup waffels (both of which I didn't take pictures...my bad!) and for its candles:

Gouda kaarsen (= candles) are considered to be the cream of the crop.
They're made of stearine/natural wax with a special prepared wick, with hardly any soot or smoke,
almost never dripping and burning for hours.

And that reminds me of what Gouda is also known for, it's famous Stadhuis, one of Holland's oldest Gothic city halls, built between 1448 and 1450:

This magnificent structure sits in the middle of Market Square, as seen here from above.
At Christmas time, Astrid says all the windows are lit with Gouda candles.
Definitely on our list to see this next holiday season.


Speaking of the Stadhuis, later in the afternoon as we ate lunch on the square, I was able to zoom in on this wedding party just coming out. You may recall that weddings in the Netherlands take place at the city hall,
as ours did here in the city where we live.


On the same market square, behind the Stadhuis and just a couple buildings from where we ate, is Gouda's Waag (= weighing house), built in 1668 for weighing goods to levy taxes.
It is now a national monument.

As happens in most of these Dutch iconic cities, there's always one big church that stands out from all the others, and that would be Sint Janskerk:

A UNESCO monument known for its stained glass windows, the church was built in the 15th-16th centuries, dedicated to Gouda's patron saint, John the Baptist.
The church was open to the public for an entrance fee (€3,50 each, as I recall) but no cameras allowed.
Sorry, NO. We'll look online. Sometimes we're cheapskates, just for the principle of it.


...but as you know by now, that doesn't keep us from walking all around to see what we can outside.
I'm a glutton especially for such arched walkways attached like this.


I'm also a glutton for seeing such a steeple while out-n-about town and knowing whose it is!

Since we're in the vicinty of the grote kerk (big church), let's cross the street to Gouda's history Museum....

...with another archway. I love those walk-throughs...
(notice Sint Janskerk so close behind once you're inside the courtyard)


...and all the gevelstenen (= gable stones) inside the courtyard.
We didn't enter the museum proper but enjoyed the inner courtyard as its own museum.

The other church that sticks out like a sore thumb while you're out walking around is the Gouwekerk, over by the vismarkt (= fish market):

In the bottom right-hand images (above) you can see the 2 pillared structures on each side of the canal (with the church in the background). In days past the fishing boats would pull up alongside these open-air structures and unload their catch for market selling.

On the way to the vismarkt, by the way, we passed the following bridge being restored:

...and as we passed it...


...LOOK AT WHAT ASTRID CAPTURED! (Rated R)
The top row was the foreplay, the bottom row 'the act.'
HA! It was a real 'quickie!'

How can you ever beat Mother Nature!


Well, we try, don't we. Look at this bit of whimsy. Is this, too, foreplay???

Now, change gears, if you can, and check out these two windmills:

't Slot (= the Lock) was built in 1832 as a grain mill.


De Roode Leeuw (= the Red Lion) was originally built in 1727, also as a grain mill.

And to tell you why we love these photo hunts so much....

...just before we rounded the corner to see the Roode Leeuw windmill, we spied this sewing machine outside in a yard, suffering from the elements. As we started taking pictures of it, this gentleman, so seemingly hungry for conversation, came out to tell us all about it. He even offered it to us...if we wanted it!

And then, just to the left of the windmill, there on the canal where we had first seen the mill from afar after first parking....

...life as they know it on the canals of The Netherlands!

Bid yourselves tot straks, now, to Gouda....

...a city of so much of what I love, like more gevelstenen (= gable stones).
You can actually see the whole shootin' kaboodle here on the Dutch database.


Enough impressions for a lifetime of enjoyment.

Gouda, the city. I have a feeling I barely got started (and you thought this was long!).