Susanne, her roommate Caitlin and I went to Gouda today. You should know they make cheese there. They're also known for sirup waffels and pipes. Like the kind you smoke. Apparently, they were renown for their pipes in the 15th century or something. Today was the open monument day, so all the things we wanted to see were free. We checked out the city hall, and all the various churches, including the St. Jans Kerk which has stained glass from the 1500s that is considered the best in the Netherlands. We checked out the old weighing house (now a cheese museum!) and a strange museum. It had a pharmacy, a hospital kitchen, toys, a torture chamber, paintings, and lots and lots of spools of thread. The girls especially found the spools of thread annoying, but I thought they were gorgeous.
The artist, whose name I can't find, was a Portuguese woman who lived in the Netherlands. She did a lot of work that had to do with finding her own identity, as a Portuguese woman, as a Dutch woman, just as a woman. The spools of thread were, in my opinion, her most beautiful work. She used them to represent her travels. Every spool had something like 300m of thread, so she collected enough to represent the distance she traveled, and she'd lay them all together over a map of the places she went. The other girls just didn't think this was cool, but it simply took my breath away.
Lolpod: There was a party going on in the city, and we wanted to see what was going on. We crossed over this little canal, checked out the party, and headed back over the little bridge. I noticed that there was a huge spider web over the canal. Somehow, this spider had managed to build his web over a distance of nearly 3m! (It was probably about 8ft or so!) I don't know how he did it. The web was on one side of the canal, but there were two support threads that spanned the canal! Beautiful! Quite a few people noticed us staring down into the canal, and we showed them the web. "Look," I said, "Flying spiders!"
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