I got a big kick out of reading this placard in one of the telescope exhibits at the Adler Planetarium during our visit there last week. Our old home town has several great museums and we visited them all, including the outstanding Boerhaave.
Next week we’ll be moving from Leiden in the Netherlands to the USA. We’ve lived here in Leiden for the last 6 years and really enjoyed this old charming town. Here are some of our pictures of Leiden.
Today we visited the new Corpus Museum in Oegstgeest, which opened on 14 March 2008. The museum is housed in an impressive 7-storey building with a statue of a large man sitting on it. Corpus features a 1-hour multimedia tour through a giant body, traveling from the stomach, through the intestines, into the heart, lungs, mouth, eyes and eventually the brain.
Today we have finally set a date for our big move to America. We bought our plane tickets today and will fly from Amsterdam to Chicago with our two cats Arby and Alex on Sunday 21 September. This means we have only 85 days left from today to arrange a lot of stuff, get rid of a lot of stuff, and move all the stuff that’s left. We’re going to have a busy three months!
Today we had a rare tour of De Meelfabriek (‘The Flour Factory’) in Leiden as part of Open Monumentendag (‘Open Monuments Day’). De Meelfabriek is an old factory near the center of Leiden, not far from our house. You can see it here from a short distance:
Last Saturday was Open Monumentendag, or Open Monument Day, in the Netherlands. Leiden goes a step further and celebrates Openmonumentendagen, or Openmonumentenweekend, opening up over 30 monuments, museums and historical buildings for the entire weekend. Each year the tourist bureau in Leiden also publishes a guide for visitors, with suggested walking or cycling routes. More »
This Sunday, 17 September, the center of Leiden will be closed to all car traffic. The city is closing the streets for an autovrije dag, or car-free day. Each year across Europe and the rest of the world such car-free days are organized; this year marks the first time Leiden will be closed to car traffic since the 1970’s. More »
Today was Open Monumentendag in the Netherlands, which means that many monuments, otherwise closed to the public, are open for free exploration. We had a walk around our town Leiden today and came across some really nice 1940’s Escher intarsia (a form of wood inlaying) works at the city’s Town Hall. More »
This Saturday 15 July marks the 400th birthday of Leiden native son and master painter Rembrandt van Rijn. The Leiden city museum, the Lakenhal (cloth guild hall), is inviting all residents of Leiden to celebrate the birthday with coffee and cake. More »
Dog poop is a big problem in the Netherlands — there are heaps all over the place. You always have to watch your step and walking on any grass in this country is like walking a minefield. Here in Leiden they have started a billboard campaign with posters that are quite explicit: one of them shows a child running after a ball that is about to roll into a fresh pile, and another shows an old lady with a steamy heap in the foreground. More »