Group Tour of Delft

After a lovely breakfast this morning, we met our local tour guide, 23-year-old Quirine ("Call me Q"), a student at the Technical University here in Delft. She tells us that the first canal was dug in this area in the 1100's when farmers needed to "unwater" the ground and make the land secure. This brought more and more people to Delft and the city grew.

Before we set off --Sam with a dull headache (after her fall) and me, a stomach ache--Q provided some basic information. Presently, there are 17,000 students studying at the universities in the cities. Delft is mainly known for the painter Johannes Vermeer and as the second largest beer producer in Holland (Haarlem is first).

The names of the streets relate to what happened on those streets: for example, Het-raam, the window where cloth is stretched and Verwersdijk, the dyke where cloth was painted. The more windows in your home, the more taxes you paid. This was how the rich bragged about their wealth but for the poor, who sealed their windows, it created bad health conditions.

We walked by the smallest house in Delft, which was the residence of the town doctor. This tiny house is only three meters wide (approximately ten feet) with two doors: the taller, more decorative one was for the royals and the other door in those days (the one into which the guy in red with the bike is entering), for the rest of us. Q says this house recently sold for 400,000 euros or around $540,000.

We were headed to the Old Church, or Oude Kerk, and Q pointed out its spire, which for 150 years was the tallest in Delft. It's not an optical illusion that the spire is leaning; it is built on an unstable foundation standing above a filled-in canal. But it would certainly make a good navigating point when trying to figure out where we are when wandering around town. (More about this church in another post.)

After visiting the Old Church, Hilbren and Q led us to the Vermeer Center for a break: coffee, tea, and Stroopwafel (a caramel wafer cookie, very good!) served by the ladies working at the center. (This museum was not part of the tour so Sam and I returned after lunch to walk through it and study the history and works of Vermeer.) Q still had more places to take us this morning.

The weather had turned from cloudy to sunny during the morning and we saw a lot of lovely street scenes. Who can stop taking photos of these beautiful canals??