Who are you?

Yes, I know your name… but I ask again

 WHO ARE YOU????

"The Utrecht University Museum manages the academic heritage of Utrecht University. Beside the conservation and restoration of the 170.000 objects the museum also organises permanent and temporary exhibitions. The dentistry, microscope, and physiology collections are among the most important in Europe."

Jip and Alexia went to the Univeristy Museum in Utrecht this sunday. Totally lazy day, we were just walking downtown and to show each other we are culturati, we decided to go there.

Tip: If you are not exactly the strongest-stomach person in this world, do not eat before going in.

The museum offers a wide collection of wax models of dissected arts, organs, bodies, heads... plus a collection of skeletons of deformed people all mixed up with various objects used in the past for surgery, dentist and other Freddy Krueger kind of arts.

The museum also host a garden that must be very nice to visit with your partner during summertime, but at this time it's just sadly dead and gray... well... if you are in depressive mode you would surely appreciate it.

If you have kids (like kids to take care of.. I don't think many EVS's have kids on their own.. maybe they made some during EVS, but that doesn't count), and they speak Dutch, it's surely worth a viit, since at the top floor there's a Jungens Lab, aka a place where lil brats can destroy things and then watch the results into a microscope.

Address
Lange Nieuwstraat 106
3512 PN Utrecht

Reception desk: (Tuesday - Sunday):
030 - 2538008
fax: 030 - 2538700

Open    
The University Museum is open from Tuesday - Sunday from 11.00 am until 17.00 pm.
Closed on Mondays, January 1st, April 30th (Queen's Day) and December 25th.

Admissions
Adult: 5 Euro 
U-pas, NS pas: 50% discount
over 65, CJP, students: 3 Euro
groups (< 10p) 3 Euro (3,50 in 2005)

 There are some paintings or artistic products what are nice but simple. They are perfect decorations in your room but not more than decorations. You don’t stop in front of them asking why this or that part was painted in that way, what is the meaning of the whole picture or a little detail.
Matthias Kamper’s paintings are definitely not only decorations. They give you enough to think about…
In general you can say they are very dynamic, colourful and organic, they are full of movements. You feel that he created his own fantasy world with all kind of strange beings and phenomenon.
These pictures tell a lot about their painter whose head is probably always full of ideas and thoughts about life, our world, death, man-woman relationship and the fact that most people are continuously searching their place.

This is one of my favourite because even it is still dynamic these eyes, which are so soft but on the other hand so highlighted on the painting, give a small calmness and balance for the picture. You want to think what is behind of this, why he painted that way?
It is always funny to see (I loved it if I would be a painter) that when you finish a painting and you think you know it in every little piece and in every meaning as you created, then the audience come out with lots of new sense, that you had never thought and discovered before.
This is what I feel with Matthias’ paintings. I am free to interpret them. I can compose my own stories around them just like anybody else. 

If you are interested in Matthias’ world you can do two things. You can go and visit his exhibition at the U.V.H. (Drift 6, Utrecht) which is open from 8 am till 5 pm (till 1st of December) or you can visit his website (http://home.wanadoo.nl/kamper) where there are many paintings. But of course they cannot substitute the real ones so I suggest you to do both:).

Wadlopen

Literally “mud walk”.

So, the other friday Me, Marit, Dorus, Robert and Viki went up in the north of the Netherlands, for a walk in the mud.

How does it work:

The lands in the country are flat. That means that a little variation of the water level has as result a huge extension of land getting underwater.

And vice versa.

Using this natural phenomena, some people had the brilliant idea of making a business out of it.

So they take people on boats, drop them in the middle of nowhere on some island made of sand, and they made them walk back to the land.

As easy as it seems? No!

Because when the water retires, it doesn't leave just sand behind.

If there were people leaving there I'm sure they would have developed a fifty words to describe the different kind of sand you can encounter.

There is the dry sand, the wet one, the one your feet get sucked in, the one with algae on, and that one with a trillion shells in that it sounds like walking on biscuits.

Then you pass rivers.. which are not rivers.. it's just water on the sand! Sometimes the easiest way to walk is to “slide” over, because the longer you stay still, the most your feet fall into the mud.

It's not a place for humans.

It's a place for birds and crabs (and some seals).

If you stay silent you can hear them, hundreds of them, around you.

Beside that, the place is unnaturally silent (or naturally, depends by the point of view). There is no echo at all, since there are not objects around you and the mud absorbs vibrations (like the snow in wintertimes).

It was exhausting sometimes, sometimes it was hilarious, trying to pull other people like in water skiing, or trying to make each other fall in the dirty, stinky mud.

It was indeed fascinating, sand all around you, no reference points... and under your feet just the footprints of the seagulls, the real owners of that reign.

Jip and Janneke as every foreign people have lots of stereotype about the Netherlands. On one hand they want to jump deeply into the Dutch culture to break down the typical prejudices but also try all kind of things that are called typical Dutch. For this reason in the last few weeks they had two trips. The first one was by the countryside to visit a tulips farm (ok, tulips are from Turkey, but in the Netherlands they are quite good at growing them), while the second was to Kinderdijk, to see the windmills.
Janneke has a housemate, Lolkje who is the daughter of a real Dutch tulip farmer.

The first impression is definitely the most important thing, and in that case it was very typical Dutch. As soon as they got out the car, they saw a little cute Dutch boy, with blond hair of course, toddling in his red wooden shoes…
On that day Jip and Janneke learnt a lot about the ‘tulip profession’. They knew that there were two kinds of tulip farmer. One who grows tulips for the flowers and the other one who grows them for the bulbs.
Lolkje’s father, Piet is the second type but of course he is very enthusiastic about the tulips in general.

The two curious visitors could see the pictures about hundreds of tulips and know which one is good to give to your lover and which one is for a funeral. Then they went to watch the thousands of bulbs in boxes and also learnt how they planted them with the help of this big net and how they cut the buds during early spring to give more nutriments to the bulbs which will then give flowers the next year...

They also knew what was the biggest enemy of the tulips. It's an illness that comes when the bulbs can’t dry out perfectly so they start to rot and infect the other bulbs after each other in the box. If you have good nose for it, like merchants who trade with tulips have, you can smell this illness even if there are only a few sick bulbs in a huge box.
So Jip and Janneke wish all the best for this nice family and lots of healthy, beautiful bulbs in the next years!

They went also to visit the windmills because after the wooden shoes and the tulips, they are the third famous things that everybody knows about the Netherlands (except the easy drugs).
This place named Kinderdijk is interesting not just because of the old, nice windmills but also the process how they use them to pump out the water from the fields what they want to use for something else. (But this part Jip can explain you more:)       
 
Up to Jip now.
Jip drove his truly Italian car thru the flat land, until Kinderdijk (GPS).
The place is pretty impressive if you see it from a techie point of view.
The river is actually HIGHER than the land around.
This is possible because the complex of windmills (in the past) and diesel pumps nowadays keep the land dry, by pushing the water to the river.
In the past it was just a pond, but industrious Dutch people were able to see in the future, and built this system to get more land to coltivate, and less mosquitos to kill.
Jokes apart, it's really impressive, and the people living there is surely proud of their work.
We got to talk with this man who still runs one of these old windmills, actively pulling the water UP with just the strenght of the wind.
Pretty impressive.... and you really feel the power of this invisible blow, whistling over the wings of the mill, torquing the internal mechanism (made of wood!!) which thru some axis rotate the underneath wheel that pull the water.
And then you stand out, and you see the massive ground that "contains" the river..yeah.. contains...! Hard to understand or picture out.. a river which is standing "over" the land and not "in".. but hey.. that's Holland!
The windmills in line give an impressive sightseeing, and the place is full of birds... very peacefull.

Janneke is here again. Just to add some girlish point of view I have to tell you about the colours of the windmills:) In the past most of them were black because people who lived in them were poor. They used black paint what wasn't really paint but more pitch. And if you could see a green windmill that meant that people in it had more money. The miller also said that in Leiden you could see red and yellow windmills as well which showed what kind of religion they had in the area. The red ones were catholic and the yellow ones were protestant.

It was also interesting to know that nowadays they have a lot of problems with the water inside of the windmills. Especially ones what are from stones can let the rain inside and that can demage the walls later. Some of the owners try to plant laureates or other kind of climbing plants what lead the water down and safe the walls against the rain.

Last week we also did "wadlopen" what is a very tipical Dutch thing as well but this is another story:)