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Dutch Wooden Shoe-Violin

April 1, 2008 at 9:47 PM

Our factory exits 110 years. This was a reason for a day out in Amsterdam and in a touristic place in the neighboorhood of Amsterdam (I had never been there before) Zaanse schans with a lot of Dutch windmills and wooden shoes:

Here a big wooden shoe in front of the museum

Wooden skates and roller skates

Here a 2 machines to make (copy) wooden shoes.
BUT ALSO WOODEN SHOE VIOLINS:



Perhaps this is the secret of Stradivarius.
Now that is cool!
Did the Dutch used to wear wooden shoes for real? We have this image of a Dutch girl in white dress and white hat something like a little Napoleon hat and wooden shoes sniffing a tulip with windmills in the background.
Bram, you find and photograph the most interesting things about violins.
Cool pictures.
Some farmers use wooden shoos. This morning I heard someone with wooden shoos in my village next to my house. Sometimes nurses use these half wooden shoes with leather on top.
Those Napoleon hats and white dresses are tradition for special days in some villages on the countrysite, mostly for older people. Tulips grow a lot specially near the coast. Flowers are a big agricultural industry in Holland/the Netherlands.
The wooden shoe violins are cool but my favorite is the wooden shoe ice skates. That would be difficult if not impossible! : )
Hahaha, it would have been rather interesting to play one of those shoes ... er violins. I'm curious as to how they sound.
Near the wooden shoe ice skates they wrote someone skate 48 seconds on 500 metre on these wooden skateshoes, while the world record on normal skates is about 34 seconds on 500 metre.
That's over 23 MPH! (On wooden skates).