Thursday, January 26, 2006
Holland - a country in one country
A couple weeks ago, we had a day off for Eid (I like the UN), so I went to Utrecht. A very fine one-day visit. Highlights:
- Utrecht has the largest railway station in Holland.
- The city has a very nice sunken canal running through it, lined with a number of bars and restaurants. Most peaceful and I'm sure in the summer most lively. Weirdly, though, you can't walk for very long along the canal. Every block or two you get stopped by a bridge and you have to go back up to street level.
- Its top attraction is the Dom Tower, at 112m the tallest church tower in the country (and probably the highest point). It's 465 steps to the top, and you stop at 4 different stages, so you don't die. (The tour guides must develop very strong legs.) There are two bell towers, which are quite amazing to be in - the bells are very cool. The top one has the second-largest peal in Europe. At the top, you can (obviously) see for miles though it was (typically) a very grey day, limiting visibility (or "vis", as my "diver" "friends" call it). V enjoyable. Here's a pic:
- Utrecht also has a really lovely museum of mechanical musical instruments, like pianolas, player pianos, street organs, dancehall organs and the like. A guide will play them for you (and sing along to the barrel organ) and some of them are wonderful. I particularly enjoyed: the Steinway reproducing grand piano where you see the keys being depressed, as if by a ghost (check out the video); the Hupfeld violin player, which has a player piano and player violins - four violins with one string each, ten mechanical "fingers" and a circular bow (check out the video); the playground organ that played an Abba medley.
- The city is very old, dating back to at least 47 CE. So the Central Museum has a very sweet little section of Roman archaeological findings - an entire room, for example, dedicated to half a Roman helmet that they found there. It also has a boat that's about 1,000 years old - long and wide, it's very cool. You could almost hear the boatswain, or whatever you call him, whip the rowers. The rest of the museum is very so-so, though they have good Gerrit Rietvelds (he's Utrecht second-most-famous son; number one is Marco van Basten) but I like these small odd museums. (My number one is still the Electro-Technical Museum in Budapest, where 2 mad scientists made the four customers create an electrical circuit and laughed when the last two touched fingers and we all got a shock.)
- In the Union of Utrecht, the seven northern provinces of then low countries decided to join forces against the Spanish, which is seen as the start of the Dutch Republic. (Interested in early Dutch history? Why not read about my trip to Delft.)
- Of course, as every schoolchild knows, the Treaty of Utrecht marked the end to the War of the Spanish Succession.
- The entry on Utrecht in Wikipedia has the most boring thing I think I've ever seen on Wikipedia -- a guide to transport in Utrecht.
