Tuesday we visited Leiden, where the first university in The Netherlands was established. Here, we visited the History of Science museum and I was able to see many things I had learned about in school such as the first microscopes made by Anton Van Leeuwenhoek. Needless to say I was always about five minutes behind the tour, because I wanted to read every explanation and take dozens of pictures of the inventions! We've come quite a ways since the 15th century, the progress and influence from theology and the Church was extremely interesting as well.
Van Leeuwenhoek's first microscopes
One of the first drawings of the human skeleton, without the use of cadaver dissection, as that was against religious beliefs at the time. Instead they used information from animal dissection.
Real mummies in the Artifacts Museum
Hieroglyphs
Replica of the rosetta stone used for hieroglyph translation
Roman Empire battle artifacts
On Thursday, we took off for Amsterdam! I was surprised at how international the city was. Especially after living in Zwolle where Dutch culture is very evident, I was able to see that Amsterdam was quite different. It was beautiful with the historic buildings, but similar to Chicago or New York there were rougher, poorer parts of the city and areas of the city influenced by other cultures such as the Chinese in their chinatown. Everything was in English; while that takes away from the Dutch feel, I didn't mind it much :) We took a boat tour through the canals and got to see multiple parts of the city from the red light district to the wealthy apartments and historic museums. We concluded the afternoon with visits to the Rijks museum to see the famous Night Watch painting among other artworks and The Anne Frank House. The Rijks Museum was captivating! I've never seen professional artwork in person and pictures cannot recreate every detail of these artworks. They were all so realistic! The Anne Frank house was equally as interesting. As we walked through the house, there were excerpts from her diary and videos explaining her life in the secret house in each room. While I'd heard much about Anne Frank's story and WWII in general, being in her house made it seem even more graphic. I was struck again with the evil of this historic event and the pain it caused so many people.
Beautiful train station where we arrived
King and Queen's Palace
bridges, canals, and more bridges...Amsterdam
Bike parking garage...thousands of bikes!!
Thursday night I experienced my first hostel. Right when we checked in and were brought to our rooms, I began thinking about how I was going to handle sleeping in this rundown place. Being slightly a germ-a-phobic, I began to imagine all the repulsive people who may have slept in the same bed as I was about to and how the clean sheets they'd given me weren't quite thick enough to keep away the germs. Finding a long black hair on my mattress and a signature sheet of WEEKLY cleanings didn't comfort me at all. After I'd been stirring these thoughts in my mind for about 10 minutes, a more experienced traveler in the group mentioned that this was one of the better hostels she'd stayed in...I decided there that I would be staying in hostels only as a last resort!
We spent the next day in the city of Delft with our business class. I don't have much background in business, so I soaked up everything. We toured two floral factories, both which smelled wonderful. One plant produced thousands of varieties of flowers and auctioned them off for export, while the other specialized in a couple of varieties of potted flowers and experimented with their genetics. After the tours we visited the world renown Delft technical university where we met with a group of Chinese students and discussed marketing techniques to attract the growing Asian tourist populations to smaller cities such as Zwolle when they visit The Netherlands.
Only one picture, but the warehouse was filled with thousands of crates of beautiful flowers!
Today I spent the day doing some homework, which is a very light load compared to my science education at Dordt, and baking "American Brownies" with my host sisters :) What a blessing my host family has continued to be! All in all, a wonderful week here in Zwolle!
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