I am back (obviously)! Had a fantastic weekend with the girls. We did a boat tour of Delft, which was fascinating....very quirky history. The tower of the old church was built on ground that was too soft, and it started to lean. Rather than re-build, they added some turrets of different sizes and shapes to make it LOOK straight. And centuries ago, they paid taxes on houses according to how many windows were on the front facade of the house. Rich people would add windows to show their wealth, but one guy didn't want to pay taxes and he had a LOT of windows, so he looked up the definition of "front facade" and it said it was the side with the front door. So he removed the front door, built up a wall and used a side entrance in the alley. We toured the Mauritshuis museum in Den Haag (The Hague) that has famous paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Fabritius, etc. We toured the Vermeer museum in Delft, which was the house he lived in. And we toured both the old and the new churches in Delft, but I didn't go up into the tower of the new church because my hip is still hurting. But that church is where all the Dutch royals are buried under the floor in the crypt. Then on the way home yesterday we toured the Haar Castle in Utrecht. I'd been there before, but it was before I spoke Dutch and the family was coming to stay so we didn't get to see all of the rooms as they were getting them ready for the family, but it's been sold since then and the family doesn't come to stay in the castle, so this time I got to see the rooms I didn't see last time. It was interesting...the last Baron was pretty arrogant. He wasn't rich enough, so he went to France I think? And found a wealthy heiress to marry, then used all her money to rebuild the castle that had been destroyed. He wanted a park with trees, but didn't want to wait for trees to grow, so rather than plant seedling trees, he ripped out trees from somewhere else and had them brought in, only the trees had to come through the town, but were too big to go around this one corner, so he bought the house on that corner, tore it down, and brought the trees in...then he didn't want to share his park with the town, so he bought every building in the whole town and tore them all down and had them rebuilt in a different place that didn't border on his park side so he had the park all for himself. He had the entire town moved so he didn't have to share.
