Today, we woke up to rain, and as I write this, there are still raindrops hitting the window of my room. After breakfast, the group met our tour guide, Felipe, who led us to Zaanse Schans, a Dutch town filled with historic windmills. Once we arrived at Zaanse Schans, Felipe explained to us a bit of the history of the windmills and the museum in general. He explained how many of the buildings that were there, including the cheese and clog making buildings (which I will talk about later), were transported to that location as part of a project taken on by an architectural engineering student. He also delved a little into the business aspect of the exhibits by explaining how they are self sustaining due to the fact that they incentivize tour guides to bring tourists by giving them commission when tourists buy merchandise.

The first stop in Zaanse Schans was a building with a clog making demonstration. Clogs are wooden shoes, which were traditionally worn by the Dutch. By hand, each clog takes about 2 hours to make, according to the clog maker who performed the demonstration. With a machine, however, it took 5 minutes. What I found the most fascinating, however, was how the machine worked! In order to make the clog, another clog was used as a guide to carve out a clog from a block of wood. It was such a simple feat of engineering, and yet one that was so effective.

The next stop was a cheese making demonstration, where we learned how traditional Gouda cheese is made in the Netherlands. This is probably what I was most looking forward to for this trip, as I absolutely love cheese, and especially Gouda. I must have tried almost every cheese that they had for sampling, and I even went back for seconds for a few of them. I ended up buying two cheeses (even though I already bought two the day before), and I probably would have bought even more if not for the fact that we needed to go to lunch.

After lunch, we went to the museum across from the clog and cheese making buildings, which taught us quite a bit about the history of trade and commerce in The Netherlands. One thing I really appreciated about the museum was that it actually had diagrams of supply chains for a couple of the goods they were describing as being integral to The Netherlands’ economical history. Unfortunately the diagrams were in Dutch and so I couldn’t read them, but it was very interesting to see real examples of concept to customer being described in a historical context.

Though today was a very rainy day, it was still nonetheless an interesting one. Hopefully the rain clears up tomorrow for the tulip auction. Seeing as it is extremely early, however, I think I will be having a fairly early night tonight.