Schiedam Open Monumentendag

Saturday 10 September was Open Monumenten Dag in Rotterdam.  That means that there were a lot of buildings open that are otherwise not open to the public.  Most of those places were in the "artsy" part of town and looked pretty boring.  However, there were also several other towns that were participating as well, including Schiedam, which is just outside of Rotterdam and which is accessible by the Rotterdam Metro system, and they had a lot of much more interesting looking buildings open.

Saturday was also the nicest, least rainy, and warmest day that we have had in a week or so.  It got up to 80 and the humidity was around 95%.  But it was still a really great day for walking around.

On my way out of town, I stopped and picked up a Museumkartje which gets you free access into a lot of museums all over the country for a year.  The card costs 45 euros but I was able to get into museums for free where I would otherwise have had to pay 7 euros so I feel like a made a really good financial  decision.  =-)

I had a whole list of things that I wanted to see, and also things that I thought I might want to see if I had the time.  I made a Google map of all of these things which is here: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=204591979570013338958.0004ac7eea5879bbe2600.  If you click on that annoying looking hyperlink, you can see little blue markers of everywhere I went.  If you click on the little blue markers you can see what the site is and, for some of them, you can zoom down to street level and see what the area looks like.

I started out by checking out the windmills and the Windmill Museum (Schiedam is known as the "Stad van Molens"--"City of the Windmills").  Then I walked quite a ways out of my way to a really pretty park to eat some lunch, and then walked back through the city, checking out museums and churches and lots of other fun things.

One thing which I noticed about Schiedam was the vast, really VAST, number of really large spiders that had webs everywhere, including places where you might want to walk.  It was fairly disconcerting.

In the Middle Ages, Schiedam had a large wall built around it.  There is only a little part of the original city wall left and it remains because it is the back of some other building.  However, some of the new city buildings have been built up to represent the old city wall.  The picture of the left is of apartments which are built into the new city wall.  These apartments are above the road that goes into the city center and it is very Medieval looking, even with the modern highway signs and flower boxes.

I do not know why they chose to build like this, and I have to imagine that it can be kind of loud, sitting right above the road, but it sure is interesting looking.





















Most of the way around the city I walked outside the old city walls.  There is a sidewalk and road that go around the periphery between the walls and the canal.  It was a really pretty walk.











There were birds everywhere, including swans that kept up-ending to get at food under the water and swans just don't look so regal when only their tails are sticking out of the water.  Some of them were also bathing themselves, so they kept doing little barrel rolls and looked fairly ridiculous.  I didn't get very good pictures of them because I know that swans can be kind of grouchy but I did get pictures of ducks.  They were less entertaining.

After walking around the city, I stopped at the Julianpark for lunch.  It was very pleasant in the shade.  There were lots of people out walking their dogs.  There were also a bunch of teenagers running around being a little dopey.

Walking through the city was interesting.  I noticed this sign, so I took a picture and looked it up when I got home.  It is a sign for a "Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses."

It was interesting to walk through the city.  Since it was such a big holiday, there were people all over the place checking out the city.  But, for the most part, it wasn't too crowded to be enjoyable.  All over the place there were stores having specials and all of the cafes looked like they were pretty full.  The sign above was all over the city.  The little red-hatted pilgrim fellow is the symbol for the Schiedam jenever industry (which I will mention later).  The sign (the picture of which I took through the back, so it is reversed) says "Cheers from Schiedam."




While I was walking down one of the little side streets I saw this little bib which I think I ought to have gotten for somebody.  It says "Mijn opa is de allerliefste van de hele wereld" or "My grandpa is the sweetest in the whole world."

The little bib on the right is kind of cute, too, as well.  It says "Heineken Biertje."  Which is meant to be cute because "biertje" is the diminutive of "beer."

I stopped at a number of different museums and churches.  Most of them were pretty involved so I will do separate posts about them but some of them were smaller museums or I didn't see very much of them, so I will include a couple here.


One museum, that was actually quite a bit more interesting than I had anticipated, was the Cooperative Museum which was dedicated to Coop grocery stores in the Netherlands.  It was teeny tiny and apparently is located in what used to be an actual tiny grocery store.  The front part still sells stuff: mostly wooden shoes and all kinds of dropjes (which are Dutch licorice candies) and other kinds of old fashioned candies.  It smelled like what I remember coops smelling like from when we used to go with Mom.


In the back, they have a little living area set up, apparently more or less how it used to be.  The museum was just those two rooms so it wasn't very extensive, but it was pretty interesting.  I went in just after a Dutch couple so I just listened (and smiled and said "leuk!" (very nice!) and practiced my Dutch-understanding skills).  It wasn't too challenging since the fellow who was talking about things kept gesturing to things as he was talking about them, so I could follow pretty well.  The bed was the kind that is inside a cabinet, like a ship-board bed, and was quite, quite small.  There was a large bin under the bed where the shop owner stored potatoes.  I just cannot possibly imagine what you would do if one of those potatoes, right under your bed, in a little enclosed space, went bad sometime.


They museum also had a little collection of children's toys, which were very intricate.  The older gentleman that I went in with was also pretty intrigued by the display of old pipes that they had.  They did a pretty good job of dressing the place and, tiny or not, it was a fun place to stop on my way through town.

I also stopped by the Stedelijk Museum.  It was on my list of places I could see but it was also one that I didn't think I would bother with.  It is the Modern Art Museum and that is just not something I get that excited about.

However, when I saw the building, I thought that it might be fun to look at.  Also, when I saw the entrance to the museum, it just looked intriguing.  It looks just like a zipper and it seems like it would have taken an awful lot of planning to get the cobble stones to lay flat  on the curve like that.

They were having a big exhibition over the weekend because of the festival.  The exhibition was called "Nul = 0" (Zero = 0)and people had been spray painting little signs that said that all over town.  Mostly what I saw was ranks of clear plastic noses laid out in a grid on the wall.  It was not the most interesting art exhibit that I have ever seen.  However, because this was the opening day, they were giving out free drinks to everyone that was there.  Which might explain why there was such a crowd.  It might also explain why the whole crowd was upstairs with the drinks and not downstairs with the noses.  The building is an old church and was kind of attractive inside but I didn't take any pictures because I wasn't sure if there would be copyright issues with photographing near the art.

Schiedam was a really pretty city.  They had loads of little parks and little strips of trees and things, all through the city.  It made for a very pleasant walk.  Although I was pretty tired by the end of it.  All told, I was out touring for 8 hours, so I feel like I got my money's worth out of my metro ticket.  I also had almost 500 pictures, so I feel like I did my duty photo-wise.

(I just took this picture because I thought it was interesting.  This is a "Neighborhood Watch" sign.)