We embarked on another set of excursions to see more water-related things. Turns out, when 25% of a country is below sea level and 2/3s of the country is vulnerable to flooding, a lot of the interesting things in the country are going to be about dealing with water - kind of like that awesome movie Waterworld (with Kevin Costner), where the majority of the world has been flooded. Maybe it all could have been avoided had Kevin utilized an effective system of dikes and polders...
Our first stop was the Museum de Cruquius, a building that was converted from a pumping station into a museum. It used to pump the water out of the Haarlemmermeer, the lake that used to occupy Haarlem. After 3 years of pumping, the lake was drained, so the pump essentially worked itself out of a job (really inspiring, yeah?). It was one of the first steam-powered pumping stations, so its kinda historically significant. Its now a museum, but didn't really have much inside it in terms of informative material - instead, it was just interesting seeing the inside workings of the museum. |
| At the pumping station, there was some sort of live reenactment going on. It was in dutch, so I didn't have any idea what was happening. I just thought it was interesting because that that beer glass he was holding was HUGE. |
We left the cruquius musuem and drove to Amsterdamse Duinwater Leiding, a park in Haarlem. Our professor told us that in order to get drinking water for the Netherlands, water is filtered and then sent to the park. The park is on top of sand dunes, so letting the water seep through the sand provides further filtration. The water is then filtered once more and is ready for household use. The park played a more vital role in the water filtration process in the past, and is now largely used for tradition's sake. It was really beautiful, and the great weather that day definitely helped.
Entirely unrelated song post - now, with twice as many songs!:
Glue was one of the first indie-rap groups that I really got into. They were made up of maker (the producer), dj dq (a turntablist), and adeem (the rapper). They made 3 great albums from 2004-2006 and then, to my dismay, split up. Here's one of their songs offa their Catch as Catch Can album, called Beat Beat Beat. Anyways, I'm bringing this up because Adeem is releasing an album in less than a month, called "The Volume in the Ground". This song is off of that album. Its kinda reminiscent of a lot of flobots' music, which is a good thing. It's called "Meet Death With a Handshake". I'm excited.
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