Netherlands Trip

Xuan & I went to The Netherlands for a short weekend trip. We travelled from Maastricht to Den Haag, and within distance to Den Haag, we went to Leiden. In Maastricht, it's like a university town but with alot of shopping centres & restaurants. Apparently, Maastricht is more uptown and the rich stays there. In Den Haag, there's the Parliament and the office where the royal family works. Oh! Over here is the museum - Mauritshuis - which holds the most famous painting of Jan Vermeer's "Girl with A Pearl Earring". This painting, I feel is similar to The Mona Lisa because the girl seems to look at you no matter which part of the room you go too. Beautiful painting. Lucky for us, the museum was also showing paintings of Rubens & Brueghel which is related to our Flemish Art module. I was mesmerized by their art pieces, it just looks so exquisite.

Next stop was Leiden, where we went to see windmills. Do you know about a century ago, Netherlands had about 10 thousand windmills, to a mere 950 now. In Leiden, the windmill named De Valk (used for corn-milling) is the sole-surviving one in Leiden open for tourists. Now, most windmills around are the electric windmills. Windmills was first created by the Romans. I realise that the Romans created alot of stuff, like windmills, paintings etc...they are such innovative people. I was looking at the structure of the windmill, I mean...they are so smart! They didn't have to study physics to know the Law of Mechanics to create something so magnificent, but now we're studying all subjects, yet the level & number of innovations that are life-changing aren't many. So why study so much? Haha...

I will post the photos soon so you will know the beautiful places I've been too ; )