Sunday Funday!!

Kelly and I had every intention to do another walking tour of Amsterdam today, but I woke up and looked out the window and this is what I saw:

This is trees snow covered with a slightly frozen lake which equals coldness. Not my dream weather for a day of walking. So we decided to take it slow and have breakfast and enjoy our morning but we wanted to get out. We decided that touring a bit more of Haarlem would be good so we set off in search of the big windmill that we saw from the train on our way to Amsterdam. This is the De Adriaan windmill which was used for grinding wheat and other goods into flour. The below picture is the griding stones they use. The wheat comes into the middle of it and is slowly pressed out of the stones by the grooves on the inside of the stones which grinds it into flour and then travels out a little whole down stairs where they bag it and send it out.

They also have a lot of windmills they use to displace water, which is how they originally removed all of the water to extend the land masses. We also learned that the Schipol airport lies in low area so if any of the dikes break....we're not flying out of here. We'll probably have bigger worries than the airport anyways.

This is a model of the De Adriaan windmill. The windmill was built in the late 1800s but burned down in 1952. They rebuilt it and it still works to this day, although they don't use it except for show. They also have windmills that saw wood. They use no extra engery, strickly wind. Talk about being green!

This is a view of the church from on top of the windmill. I never realized how close everything was....or how big that church is! It only took 200 years to build as well. But as we learned later today, thats just a drop in the bucket!

Kelly and I for a photo op. The people who ran the windmill were SUPER nice and friendly. He took a picture for us so we didn't want to criticize his finger in the corner. They were all older people, but very helpful and talked to us and told us stories. Very nice experience. All of our visitors will be sent here, so be prepared!

After the windmill visit, we to to Teylers museum. It too is just down the street from the windmill and our apartment. They are the oldest museum in the Netherlands and they have a huge fossil collection. I have never seen so many fossils, its what you see in pictures. They have a fossil that is 200,000,000 years old!!!!! There in front of your face.....you are looking something so old. It makes you think about how little of a role we humans really play in the scheme of things. Very humbling!

They also has a great art collection including many Michelangelo drawings and Rembrandt sketches. They collected art from the current day Dutch masters. This only reinforces my belief that if I start collecting art today, maybe in 200 years it will be worth something :)

This picture is of the oval room. This museum has a huge collection of tons of different things. They have some original telephones, radiation equipment, books from Charles Darwin, and neanderthal skulls. History is just laid out in pretty shelves. It is mind boggling that these people dreamt of these inventions hundreds of years ago and then other people had the idea to start collecting them. The forsight of our ancestors!

On our way back, we decided to stop and have an early dinner. We were walking along and found the Nobel resteraunt. It looked cute so we thought we should explore. When we walked in, we realized it was for Nobel peace prize winners. I think the paper said that they have had real nobel peace prize winners visit there, but it was all in Dutch so I'm not sure how much I really understood. Anyways, they had the Obama burger.

My favorite part of this is that the burger is a veal burger. It made me mad, again, that Obama got the prize anways, but to know that they gave him the veal burger made me feel a bit better. We also wanted to get a desert but we asked if they could put it in a doggy bag for us so we could eat it when we got home. This seemed to be an unusual request, but they were nice and improvised something for us. I got the rubarb cake and Kelly got the cheesecake. They also were worried about putting ice cream with it, but we knew it wouldn't melt on the walk home!

The cheesecake is on the left with ice cream and the rhubarb is on the right with ice cream. The presentation of it made us laugh and everybody stared at us when walking home. Apparently, take home isn't normal in the Netherlands.

I enjoyed seeing another side of our new city today. Not good weather, but there were hardly any people out on the streets. Much better than the masses that were in Amsterdam. It was peaceful and cool, I couldn't ask for more. This place just keeps growing on me!