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Published: July 19th 2010
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Holland's biggest shoe
Carved out of a single piece of poplar wood, it's bigger than a bathtub inside. We started the day with a run/bike ride with the whole family. We tried a new trail which was very nice and took us past several farms with cows, sheep, goats, chickens, baby chicks, and had no traffic except for one guy on a horse & buggy (and he had a buggy whip so I guess that industry hasn't completely shut down)! Part of the trail was just a cycling path across the top of a dike. I think this was my favourite run so far and I'll definitely do that route again.
Today we went to the city of Zaandam and took in the Zaanse Schanse which is a grouping of mills and museums interspersed with (very) old houses that people still live in (I guess they'd call that a living museum - they argue it gives the area a sense of life and community it would otherwise lack). My personal favourite was the clock museum. They had 7 centuries of clocks, the oldest of which used a cannon ball as a weight and it measured the daylight of a day in 12 equal portions (not necessarily 12 60-minute periods since in summer the day light is longer than
These would last > 20 years
A little on the heavy side, so we decided not to go for a jog in them. 12 hours). There was another museum that showed the history of Verdake (maker of biscuits and chocolates). I think the highlight of the day (for Nigel for sure) though was the clog museum where they actually performed a demonstration of a real clog being made! They originally carved them by hand (which was demonstrated) but later on they had tools (similar to a lathe) that carved each clog out of a block of wood and another machine that carved out the inside of the clog! It was really cool! There were hundreds of clogs on display in the museum (including clog soccer shoes, clog skates, clog boots, clog roller blades, clogs made into violins, clog flower pots - that was a little Forest Gump there for you).
Once again, it was a beautiful sunny day but not too hot! Our new Dutch neighbours Matty & Marinella came over to our back garden for a Dutch style BBQ. They literally showed up -- and I'm not kidding -- with a big wheelbarrow that they'd pushed down the street from their house. partly to return it to our house swap host, partly to carry a very large amount of meat. The
Starting with a block of wood...
This guy did a demo of making clogs both by hand and with more modern woodworking equipment. BBQ lasted for hours. The idea is that you grill up a bunch of different meats and eat it with salads, beers and so on. Then after about an hour, you do it again. Kind of like Round I, round II etc.. Part way through, Matty's brother Timo (short for Timothy) joined us. We took to calling him T-Bone, which he seemed to like. He'd just returned from a trip to Canada himself and we had a laugh comparing Tim Horton's XL double double to the size of coffee you get in Holland (very very small, almost like espresso sized cups, it's all they have). The night was a lot of fun. At the end, Matty got his Playstation 3 and we played a bizarre game in Dutch and laughed our heads off.
One neat but kind of scary thing from last night was the bats that came out at dusk. We sat out in the back garden and watched them swooping back and forth. Mathias showed us how you can toss a pebble up in the air and the bats swoop over to try and grab it. Fascinating to watch.
We must have left the patio door
...he made a clog
It took him about 2 minutes all together. The wood is so wet that he blew in the shoe hole and a bunch of water came out. They air dry them in the sun for 2 weeks. open at some point because we woke up this morning to find a toad walking around the living room. At least it wasn't a bat.
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