The white village of Thorn

Here's another town in the Netherlands that I visited just before Computational Geometry Week: Thorn, also known as "the white village". The story goes that when Napoleon took over the Netherlands, he instituted a building tax based on how many windows each building had. So the villagers bricked up many of their windows and then, to make the change less obvious, whitewashed the buildings. The buildings are still painted white and give the place a distinctive look.

It's a small town, so not something that would likely fill a whole day of sightseeing, but very pretty. Behind the church we found an art gallery where an older man had put on a show of his art about trains, including paintings, prints based on old engineering drawings, and a giant model of the bridge over the river Kwai; it was the first day of the show and we were the first to visit.

( The rest of the photos )

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