BOX 247: The Netherlands and Wisconsin.

Joe Milicia
Mar 3, 2023
3 min read

A lazy Dutch canal--I imagine a lot of towns in the Netherlands have canals like these, but this one happens to be in Delft, June 2003, when Anne and I were finishing up our European trip that had included Spain, Venice and Germany (see the last several posts). We were interested in Delft in particular because in the coming fall semester we were going to participate in a campus-wide reading and classroom use of Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, a fictional account of a servant girl who posed for Vermeer's famous painting. The novel features a good number of actual Delft locations, and I wanted to take some photographs to show students.

I'm now at a point in my digital scanning of all my old slides where I have to guess at the exact order of the pictures. As I mentioned several posts ago, I neglected to number the slides in the boxes dating 2003-06 (the developer first having neglected to print numbers), and I'd even allowed some slides to spill out of their boxes. My OCD side is bothered by my not knowing the 'correct' chronological order of all my slides--but starting with this post I'm having to make guesses as to the 'proper' order of my pics. My biggest decision at the moment is whether some Amsterdam photos were taken before or after the Delft ones--we visited the smaller town as a day trip from the Dutch capital. Well, let's start with Amsterdam. It appears that I took mostly sunset pictures, including the first one below, a sort of iconic Amsterdam image featuring the Zuiderkerk at the end of a canal:

Scanning the slides, I see we must have gone to the Willet-Holthuysen Museum, since I took a photo of the garden. (Thanks, Google Lens, for .identifying it!) But I have absolutely no memory of it:

Here are more sunset views:

The narrow house in the next photo is probably in Amsterdam but possibly it's Delft. (Google Lens has let me down this time.) We had a fine day exploring Delft (about an hour's train ride from Amsterdam), a fairly small town crisscrossed by canals. At its center is its Market Square, with the City Hall at one end:

Here's a closer view:

And yet closer:

Facing the City Hall from the opposite side of the square is the New Church (Nieuwe Kerk)--built in the 1400s but more 'new' than the Oude Kerk (built 1250-1350) a few blocks away.

A statue of humanist Hugo Grotius, born in Delft, stands near the New Church:

The tower of the New Church is visible from much of the old town. Here is a side view:

And here it is from a bit more distance:

It can also be seen from the Beestenmarkt (the 'Beasts Market') a few blocks away:

No longer filled with butcher-shop stands, the Beestenmarkt is a lively summer hangout place:

As for the Old Church, here it is, alongside a canal:

I see that I have yet another image of the Old Church, but on a plate of Delftware--evidently we stopped at a museum:

I can't identify the canals in the next several photos--maybe some are stretches of the same canal as shown at the top of this post:

We took a canal boat ride at some point:

Walking along another canal with lots of water lilies we saw that some kind of water bird had made a nest, and were startled to see a baby bird peeking from the back or wing feathers of its mother. I've only just now learned that they were great crested grebes:

These pics complete the large number of photos we took on our May-June 2003 trip. Back home Aron and Tiffany had moved from their near-downtown home in West Bend to a farmhouse on the southwestern edge of town, and we visited them soon after getting back home, finishing up the slide roll. First here is Tiffany with Sam and Forest--Sam wearing a Venice t-shirt we brought back and Forest wearing . . .you'll see in later photos:

Here are the four of them posing with garden implements. Now you can see that Forest's t-shirt is a souvenir from the Parc Guell in Barcelona with its Antoni Gaudi salamander sculpture. And I should mention that Aron's t-shirt shows that he had now started his business, Extra Mile Landscaping.