Friday, May 5, 2000

It's a national holiday here in The Netherlands--freedom day, the day they were liberated from Nazi oppression. Of course, the war was "a long time ago" so they only celebrate it once every five years, we are told.

We took the day off and went wandering about. We ended up at the open-air museum. After seeing that the Dutch move the ocean and have been doing so for centuries, I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that they have moved dozens of historically-interesting houses from peat huts to a chapel, many of them build of stone and brick, to a park, to create an open-air museum displaying important features of Dutch history.

It gave me a sense like nothing else has ever done of what Joe Average lived like a few hundred years ago. A dozen people living in two rooms constructed at the edge of a barn, sleeping by pairs in little boxes in the walls that are smaller than today's single beds--if they were lucky enough to have beds. And from the number of times fire appears to have destroyed buildings at the museum, I have to assume that fire was an even bigger problem when there were constant live fires in these houses that were largely constructed of wood, straw, and other combustibles.

We picked a perfect day for our visit. It could not have been much warmer and still have been pleasant, but as it was we had warm sunshine outside and comfortable breezy shade, with cooler air inside brick buildings.

Unfortunately, we couldn't take the pictures we really wanted to take, pictures of the dim insides of buildings, and even if we had been able to, we would not have succeeded in conveying their character. Van Gogh's dark Potato Eaters most vividly expresses what it was like in there; that was very concrete realism.

After the museum closed, we nipped over the border to Germany for supper and somewhat less expensive fuel. It takes about three times as long to return from supper in Germany than it does to take the bus from Utrecht Centraal Station to De Uithof -- and that doesn't include the average of 10 minutes or so waiting for the bus to appear or the time to walk from wherever we had supper to Centraal Station, so it's probably closer to twice as far (in terms of driving time) to go to Germany for supper than to go downtown. And considering the cost of parking in Utrecht (fl 5 per hour) it is probably about the same cost to drive to Germany; at least in Kleve where we ate supper, there was no charge for parking after 5 pm and we only used a few gallons of gas.

This is very strange to an American.