Utrecht 3

This will be a very random post. These are some pics I took that are a little out of context but I thought were interesting. The first two are small mosaic murals under a pedestrian bridge on the bike path along the canal near the apartment where we stayed. The first of course is Spinoza.

One of many illustrious mailboxes along the streets of Utrecht. By the way, I could never get used to walking along those streets because the front windows were more often than not wide open to the street. Many times I felt like I was passing by a store front only to glance right into someone's domestic scene. Most people would put like a strip of opaque glass, horizontally across this window so the passerby would be forced to look at the little tableau of nic nacs set up on the sill. In any case it was really charming but also often confusing for the novice flaneur in the Netherlands.

This is the interior of a former church now the Speelklok Museum, the most fun and interesting museum, aside from Musee Mechanique, I have ever been. It's a bit much to explain fully in a short blog post so to sum up, I can tell you that it traces the history of these emormous one man band, elaborately facaded mobile music units through their earliest beginnings in clock towers through their demise in the 1950s with the takeover of modern popular entertainment. This upstairs hall had lots of music boxes, a stop on the timeline of these unbelievably well engineered machines. I took videos of A winding one of the emormous ones up. I'll show you later.

This isn't that great of a pic but these three small devices play music and do incredible things. The clock on the left has a "living painting" that really unexpectedly moves. The acrobat in the back corner does gravity defying tricks and the painter is none other than Vincent Van Gogh whose sunflowers spin on the canvas as he tries to paint them. Kind of an early psychedelic effect.

After the museum we took a walk and passed by this long forgotten bookstore complete with bleached out, tattered cover paperbacks and other long neglected reader paraphernalia. It was like a ghost sitting there in plain sight wedged between two well maintained hip establishments. I wondered what its story is? 

An assortment of graffiti we often walked by on our way to and from the flat.