At long last, we received our air shipment today!!! You just can't believe how bad it is not having your stuff (we're dealing with true first world problems here)! Our furniture and other big stuff is still en route (next Wednesday), but at least we have all our clothes, kitchen stuff, and my road bike!
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| Sadly, it was attached to my favorite car of all time in this picture. The one that I no longer own. The one that might be replaced with (sniff, sniff) an SUV! |
The delivery guys were great. They got our stuff unloaded, carried down our street (no room to park the van in front of our place without blocking traffic), and up one, two, or three flights of stairs in well under two hours despite all of Eliza's and Daisy's help! And got all of the packaging materials out of here - and were incredibly friendly. We got everything put away reasonably well, but there's still quite a lot to do. Hard to believe how much stuff a family has.
We got around quite a bit more this week. We made the trek to the main library (Central Station) and found a reasonable selection of English books for the girls. Eliza chose Puss & Boots, which Holli has been reading to her at night over the last several days. It stays pretty close to the movie, which was pretty entertaining! I got a kick out of seeing this poster in the window:
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| Misery: A Feel Bad Musical. Too bad for me that it's in Dutch! |
We also made it over to Vondelpark, where they had some very interesting art on display (which is pretty common there I believe). Here's one finger-lickin' piece that reminded us of home:
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| May be hard to see, but that's an 8 foot tall mama bird feeding her baby birds in the KFC bucket. And that's also a typical number of bikes in any picture taken in the city limits. |
Lilli has taken a liking to making shelters - or at least working on them. She started one that same day while her sisters were kicking it in the "water park" in Vondelpark:
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| Lilli's friend didn't speak English, but they had fun anyway. |
On Friday we decided to rent a car for the weekend so that we could get out of town - and maybe pick up a few things. At our eccentric neighbor's suggestion, we went straight from the rental place (at Central Station, so another long walk) out to Zaanse Schans. Turns out, this place was very cool. They make cheese, cast pewter, carve wooden shoes, and they have windmills! Real ones, that were built in the 1600's and still work & make products. We toured two of them.
The blade behind/ above them in the photo above was turning pretty fast. Fast enough that the skull on the sign was as telling as the gate itself: There are not a lot of safety precautions in Holland compared
to the US - apparently they assume that people have sense! The video below gives a good sense of the proximity (from the other side of the platform).
The first windmill that we toured (De Zoeker, featured in the above video) was built in 1672 (300 years before me) and relocated to this site in 1968. The wind powers equipment (generally gears, etc. all made of wood) that drives massive stone wheels that crush peanuts into a moist meal.
The meal is heated and stirred (you can see the top of the "stove" and the agitator towards the end of the second video above) and then manually loaded into canvas bags. The bags are squeezed by an ingenious device that is also driven by the wind. Thankfully, that device was not in operation the entire time that we were touring. The very loud noise that sounds like a large post being dropped several feet onto a piece of wood IS exactly that. You can see the upper portion of the post in the first video above. I am 100% sure that many of these mill operators lost their hearing.
As the pressure inside the canvas bags reaches some astronomical amount (20 bar? 200 bar? I can't recall exactly), all of the oil from the meal runs out of the canvas into a pan, where it is collected and manually transferred to drums. Peanut oil, processed with near zero carbon footprint (not quite zero: they do heat the oil by burning wood, and the mill worker may have been a little gassy).
The second windmill was named Het Jonge Schaap, and it is an "exact" re-creation of a 1680 mill that was demolished in 1942. Various interests collaborated to measure the old mill prior to its demolition, and to use those prints to build the new one - largely by hand - in 2007. Het Jonge Schaap is a sawmill that uses the wind to pull the large tree trunks from the water, drive the multiple blades up and down, and pull the wood through the blades. Although it only moves about 2 millimeters per stroke (the stroke speed being largely determined by the wind speed), it makes multiple cuts simultaneously, so an entire tree can be processed in about an hour or two. Not blazing speed by any means, but again - no electricity, gas, coal, etc. required to pull this off. All of the wood is available for sale at the same price as you would find from a commercial mill.
I didn't say much about the car we rented, so I'll take this opportunity. It was a Fiat Panda. "Fiat" I'm thinking when the rental guy "hooks me up" with an Italian speed machine that brings back memories of uncle Larry's sweet ride from back in the late 70's (early 80's?). Reality set in before we got out of the garage. Granted I'm used to my 335 with its 350 ft-lbf of torque, but come on! The Flintstone's car had better acceleration than this "sporty hatchback." It did get us around town, but the second severe shortcoming became apparent shortly after we got out of the garage - no AC. Normally in a location this far north, AC is not that much of a necessity. However, the temperature last weekend reached 34 C - that's 93 degrees American! To put this in perspective historically, the average HOTTEST day of the year in Amsterdam is 21 (July 16th). That's 70 degrees Fahrenheit. So it was 23 degrees hotter than normal last weekend. Thus the carbon footprint comments above...
And us with no AC, nor enough gerbils under the hood to develop a breeze strong enough to keep our faces dry. And yes, I do get the irony of complaining about a lack of horsepower in the same paragraph as complaining about the effects of climate change. But what's the internet for if not to complain with ill-reasoned logic?
Just to see how hot we could get, we decided to take a trip to the beach on Saturday. The three girls crammed into the back and we drove about 45 minutes to a nice - and big! - beach on the North Sea.
The beach was a little different than the southern US. The water was chilly (reminded me of our summer trips to Maine), the men's suits were distinctly smaller, and there was some (thankfully limited) nudity, but all in all we had a great time. The girls loved it and are excited to go back - just need to buy a car (with a big engine that can drive the AC compressor so that we can fight this heat!)
Since we had the car, we decided to hit a few stores on Sunday. Praxis (think Home Depot in various sizes - all smaller) and IKEA (my first experience there) were the big winners. We managed to cram nearly $300 worth of plants from Praxis into the back of the Panda; fortunately we decided against buying anything further at IKEA - I don't know where we would have put it.
We made another trip Sunday morning before returning the car to Central Station. Got this pic on the walk back. Some of the architecture here is awe-inspiring (Eliza, however, was not inspired):
We found my new favorite park today after lunch: Rembrandt Park. It's less crowded than some of the other big parks, has open spaces, a couple of playgrounds, and a petting zoo. And a Lamborghini!!!!!
I had to get this pig video in here too - lots of personality:
This thing was in the park too - these two were at the top before I could stop them. Again, not something that I would ever expect to see in a park in the US. Unless there were safety harnesses.
More next week - I have lots to say about driving in this city, just too tired to continue tonight!
Remember I said something about limited safety precautions?
The meal is heated and stirred (you can see the top of the "stove" and the agitator towards the end of the second video above) and then manually loaded into canvas bags. The bags are squeezed by an ingenious device that is also driven by the wind. Thankfully, that device was not in operation the entire time that we were touring. The very loud noise that sounds like a large post being dropped several feet onto a piece of wood IS exactly that. You can see the upper portion of the post in the first video above. I am 100% sure that many of these mill operators lost their hearing.
As the pressure inside the canvas bags reaches some astronomical amount (20 bar? 200 bar? I can't recall exactly), all of the oil from the meal runs out of the canvas into a pan, where it is collected and manually transferred to drums. Peanut oil, processed with near zero carbon footprint (not quite zero: they do heat the oil by burning wood, and the mill worker may have been a little gassy).
The second windmill was named Het Jonge Schaap, and it is an "exact" re-creation of a 1680 mill that was demolished in 1942. Various interests collaborated to measure the old mill prior to its demolition, and to use those prints to build the new one - largely by hand - in 2007. Het Jonge Schaap is a sawmill that uses the wind to pull the large tree trunks from the water, drive the multiple blades up and down, and pull the wood through the blades. Although it only moves about 2 millimeters per stroke (the stroke speed being largely determined by the wind speed), it makes multiple cuts simultaneously, so an entire tree can be processed in about an hour or two. Not blazing speed by any means, but again - no electricity, gas, coal, etc. required to pull this off. All of the wood is available for sale at the same price as you would find from a commercial mill.
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| Logs awaiting processing at Het Jonge Schaap. De Zoeker in the background. |
And us with no AC, nor enough gerbils under the hood to develop a breeze strong enough to keep our faces dry. And yes, I do get the irony of complaining about a lack of horsepower in the same paragraph as complaining about the effects of climate change. But what's the internet for if not to complain with ill-reasoned logic?
Just to see how hot we could get, we decided to take a trip to the beach on Saturday. The three girls crammed into the back and we drove about 45 minutes to a nice - and big! - beach on the North Sea.
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| Lucy was paying attention! |
Since we had the car, we decided to hit a few stores on Sunday. Praxis (think Home Depot in various sizes - all smaller) and IKEA (my first experience there) were the big winners. We managed to cram nearly $300 worth of plants from Praxis into the back of the Panda; fortunately we decided against buying anything further at IKEA - I don't know where we would have put it.
We made another trip Sunday morning before returning the car to Central Station. Got this pic on the walk back. Some of the architecture here is awe-inspiring (Eliza, however, was not inspired):
We found my new favorite park today after lunch: Rembrandt Park. It's less crowded than some of the other big parks, has open spaces, a couple of playgrounds, and a petting zoo. And a Lamborghini!!!!!
I had to get this pig video in here too - lots of personality:
This thing was in the park too - these two were at the top before I could stop them. Again, not something that I would ever expect to see in a park in the US. Unless there were safety harnesses.
More next week - I have lots to say about driving in this city, just too tired to continue tonight!
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