Day Trip to Leiden

I went on a day trip to Leiden, which is 40 minutes' train ride away southwest of Amsterdam. It is a university town.

 The entire Netherlands is still in lockdown so I could only bear a couple of hours of walking around before I got too cold and needed to go back to Amsterdam. However, it would be nice to come back and rent a bike to bike around.

When I got off the train, I needed to go to the washroom. The washroom only accepts payment in the form of debit card, and having none, I decided to explore the town via finding a washroom.

A creatively windy path along the river.

I got to the city centre easily and was willing to pay for something at McDonald's to use their washroom. I was just surprised that it was still open and it was free to go to. Also in downtown: The Hudson's Bay Company, all the way in Leiden!

 By this time it was already pretty chilly on this cloudy day so I bought a warm tea and walked around town with it.

So many nice places to go into and have a sit...if only they were open, which they were not.

I had an idea to listen to an audio walking tour of Leiden while walking around. I tried to find some on YouTube, but there were videos of people filming themselves walking around the city rather than a tour of its history and such, which is more what I was looking for.

I went to one of my go-to places to check out some quick history of the town, wikitravel.org There, I found that there are over 80 mural poems across the city on the side of its buildings! I had came across one earlier and took had taken a picture. I tried to go on the website for a route with an itinerary of these poems, but no luck.

 

 

 

One of the poems in the city.

Another poem.

  I even found plaques around town that indicated a website that I could go to that promised audio guides of the city describing various features. But the website looked like it had been taken down long ago.

A plaque promising an audio guide on the website. If only the website still existed!

Finally, I downloaded an app that I could use to discover the history, people and places of the town. But once I did, I thought, who would want an app for this? The point is to wander around and complement the wanderings (with audio), not to look down at the phone and trip over a cobblestone while my eyes are on a screen.

I wonder if this is what the archaeology of tourism looks like: a digital graveyard of websites taken down, broken links, and real-life indicators that point nowhere.

While I was busy looking at my phone after taking a picture of a poem on the wall, just above the phone were two webbed feet.

Like this.

I had never seen feet like that, silver, scaly with thick digits. It turned out to be some sort of bird that wasn't scared of me at all and was expecting something of me

It turned out to be this fellow. Looks indignant. Found out it's a Eurasian coot. "Extremely territorial."

Cute herb/vegetable garden with cards.

Oh, and this is the birthplace of Rembrandt.