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Avid outdoorsman and underwater photographer, Barry Brown has spent the last seven years documenting life above and below water in Curacao, Netherlands Antilles. Focusing on the island's coral reefs, he has worked hand-in-hand with several businesses and environmental groups, including SECORE, a marine conservation organization based in the Netherlands. His image of a research submersible was recently featured on the cover of DIVER magazine.

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Wooden Clogs, Wooden Shoes, Clogs, Curacao
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May 3, 10     Comments Off

Queens Day

Hi Friends, I received a few requests asking for a photo from Queens Day in Punda and I think this one is pretty fun.  Like I said  a few blogs back, on Queens Day it was wall to wall people either eating and drinking or selling and buying.  I came across this stand in downtown Punda and just had to stop and check it out.  These are wooden shoes from Holland or as they are called here, Clogs or Klompen’s.  Why wear wooden shoes you ask??  And what kind of folks are wearing or buying them, well here’s your answer.  Farmers, market-gardeners and so on are most of the time wearing wooden shoes.  That is because it’s very handy to wear them when you walk on dirty ground.  It’s also to protect yourself.  You can wear boots of rubber, so you won’t get dirty feet, socks and trousers (at the underside of course).  But there are some disadvantages when you wear boots instead of wooden shoes!  If you are a gardener you probably won’t need wooden shoes, but if you are a farmer and you have some dangerous, sharp objects on your farmyard, and it would be everything except nice to have the weight of a cow on, a nail, a point of a pitchfork or something like that in your feet, therefore you can better wear wooden shoes, because
  • They protect you!
    You won’t feel or you won’t even notice when you are standing on the point of a nail, because the nail won’t get into your wooden shoes.  And if you do the same (standing on a nail) when you are wearing boots of rubber you’ll scream and maybe even cry because it hurts terribly to stand on a sharp point.
  • There are also a lot of people who wear wooden shoes because you can get in and out of them easily without wasting a lot of time.
  • And mostly you won’t sweat in wooden shoes, because fresh air can reach your feet and if you wear boots it’s impossible for the fresh air to reach your feet.
    • Wooden shoes used to be made entirely by hand, but now they are made by machines.  Making wooden shoes by hand has almost completely disappeared.  Only at some places in Holland you can watch people who make wooden shoes just as in the past, like the old artisans.
    To make wooden shoes of a piece of wood you need to have professional knowledge.  The artisan gets this professional knowledge out of experience, but you have to have some natural ability.  For more info on Clogs check out     www.cloggieshop.com 
     
    That’s it for this evening, a big thanks for all the compliments on yesterdays photo, as usual you guys are the best!!  Be back tomorrow, Barry

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