Luckily we’d wandered around Utrecht yesterday, because today was a horridly cold blustery and snowy day. Perfect for musea. We headed for the Central Museum, somewhere I’d yet to get to, but now free with the Museum Year Cards we’d bought at Muiderslot. A really wanted to see the 1000 year old boat (you can see a pic here) excavated from a local swamp. But as it turned out, the highlight was actually the dollhouse, which was a reproduction of 11 rooms of a 17th century house, down to miniature paintings on the walls and a lying-in room. Quite amazing. It was hard to take pictures through the glass, but these should give you an idea.
A sitting room.
The lying-in room (room for giving birth).
Another sitting room, with a musical performance underway.
It’s actually quite a nice museum, not so large, but with a lot of interesting art and other objects. I think they change things around a fair amount as well, so worth going back to.
Liam was actually pretty good during the whole thing, but he does tend to make one speed through exhibits faster since he loses patience with sitting still. During lunch in the museum cafe he was very active – wanting to run about the whole place and say hi to people. It wasn’t until he was getting back in the stroller that he started to fuss. But, as A observed, people here are a great deal more forgiving of babies being babies here – we didn’t get the looks of death that we might have gotten in North America.
After lunch we popped in at the Nijntje Museum, which is part of the Central Museum, originally so A could pick up some gifts for kids of friends. But we decided to pop in for a looksee and were glad we did – there’s a whole play area for kids, a nice place to let them run around while mum’s get to sit down (at least in theory – Liam is a little too prone to stair climbing and exploration for this to work quite yet for me). Liam liked the Nijntje house.
A in the play area.
After properly tiring Liam out, we took a walk through the centre to put him to sleep. It was still very cold, but at least the snow and bluster had stopped. The Nieuwegracht.
A exploring the nooks and crannies.
Then we’d had enough and headed off to the restaurant on the Oudegracht to wait for Ivo and dinner of mussels and frites. A lovely day and it was great to have A in town. Tomorrow evening we go up to Amsterdam to see a talk by Michael Pollan about In Defense of Food with our mutual friend bg, and A will stay there for the rest of her stay, although I’ll join them on the weekend.