The Pilgrims

One thing which I failed to do, much to my shame, was to adequately plan for checking out Pilgrim stuff when I was at Leiden.  I did try to see the Pilgrim Museum but I could not find it. (I plan on blaming that on Google Maps.)  Moreover, I ended up walking past all kinds of good stuff--like the place where they used to chop off criminals' hands--without a second thought, or stopping to take a picture.  My only consolation is that I ran out of time to do a bunch of stuff while I was there so I will probably go back at some point, anyways.  I definitely need a picture of the place where they chopped off hands.  You, however, do not have to wait until I catch up on my homework to see that and other cool historical things.  You can look at the website of the "Leiden American Pilgrims Museum" right here.  They have a fair bit of historical stuff there as well as some pretty extensive photo slide shows about Leiden.  The most pertinent is the "Pilgrims' Tour of Leiden" which is quite full (it has 68 photos) with lots of interesting information.  You can go straight to it here if you would like.

This, however, is a picture St. Pieter's Kerk, beside which many of the Pilgrims lived during their stay in Leiden.  If my various wild assumptions are correct, the row of houses that is standing where the Pilgrim houses once stood is just the other side of the church, behind that car.  That may be a door and window of one of the houses just visible between the tree branches.

A Correction about the Leiden Relief (which we will pretend was our little joke): of course William didn't flood 7 miles of Dutch folk (i.e. half of the Netherlands) to save Leiden.  He flooded Leiden out of some river or canal or something, much closer to Leiden (although still inflicting significant damage to nearby towns) which explains why they needed so much wind to make it work.