So Andy reminded me about what I left off about Sunday’s adventures - the Player Piano Museum!! It’s probably for the best though, because it deserves its own post.

We showed up at the museum (which we read about in our guide book), and the door was closed. We had to ring the bell, and a little Dutch man (well a tall, skinny old Dutch man with glasses, to be precise) came to the door, looked at us confusedly for a moment, and said, “You like to visit the museum?” “Yes, we would.” So we went in, paid our 5 euro, and shortly discovered that it would be 5 euro well spent. There were three other tourists there, who were together, and the museum was in two rooms. The little man talked us through the history of player pianos from beginning to end, supplemented with various performances! The first Pianolas were big machines that ran on suction. They wheeled up to the front of a normal piano and played the notes for you, but someone still had to sit there and regulate tempo, pedal, and dynamics with pedals and knobs and things. He did this for us, and it was astounding.

Then he showed us the next player piano, which was similarly operated, but from within the piano itself. He explained all about the folks who bought them, what life was like at that time, the place the player piano played in their social lives, etc., as well as the technical aspects of the pianos’ development - how the pianos work, how the music scrolls were produced, how many different pieces were produced as scrolls, how many they have at the museum (over 20,000), where the scrolls are now, where you can get them now, etc. He explained that there is one company that still makes them, and one can therefore acquire modern music as well as the traditional, classical works. He put a scoll in to play for us, and we expected Billy Joel or Elton John, or perhaps even something more recent - Norah Jones, maybe? Nope - At Last. He played At Last. Great song, of course, but it just made us giggle a bit after the emphasis he placed on how modern some of the pieces can be.

There were four demonstrations in total, but he played more than one piece on each of them, and he even took requests. One thing I did not know is that the companies who sold the scrolls actually paid famous virtuoso pianists and even composers to record their performances onto these scrolls. (Little man didn’t know how the recording worked - he said all of the recording machines were lost during the Great Depression) SO, one can actually here how Prokofiev wanted his pieces to be played, or how Horowitz played Mozart. That, to me, is amazing. Watching this piano play a piece exactly how Prokofiev himself played it 100 years ago was an experience unlike anything I had ever imagined. Wow.

So anyway, if you’re in Amsterdam, you should go say hi to the little man and check out the player piano museum - it rocks.

Quick note:
Party was excellent. ZERO good gossip, unfortunately, but I won an award for being so awesome. About 12 people won it, and the 6 remaining members of my department were among them, and we actually won together for being an awesome department, but still - very cool to be recognised.

Anti-American slurs overheard so far this week:
- (Looking at photos of a recent wedding in America) “Well, you know how Americans are - just look at them - how do they get so fat? They are SOOOO fat.”
- (Talking about the number of English people getting plastic surgery as their Christmas gifts) “Soon we’ll all be walking around with massive plastic surgery and have fake everything like the Americans.”