Today started off with Watersnoodmuseum. The museum highlighted a tragic flood that happened in the area in 1953. This flood killed over 1800 people, and this included many children too. The artifacts that I got to see in the museum were from Zeeland, even though this flood was on a lot of the Netherlands coast. I had no knowledge of this flood before visiting the museum, so seeing all of the facts and figures was very touching. Fortunately, the Netherlands invested a large amount of resources and money into building Dutch dikes. These dikes were designed to stop another traumatizing flood from occurring again. However, building them was no easy task. There are countless amounts of people involved with the building one, such as engineers, farmers, politicians, or just regular citizens. One might look at a dike or dam as a viable solution to flooding while another sees it as destruction of their property, farm, or space for another building. These water barriers also need to be paid for, so taxpayers around the country will have to pay even if they aren’t directly being affected. I got to see an interactive video which highlighted how countries like the Netherlands and England are dealing with flood issues. It asked me what my opinion was and then showed a video of a counter argument to demonstrate how many perspectives go into the process of building a water barrier.

Following the museum, we got to go to Deltapark Neeltje Jans, which is an educational amusement park. This amusement park wasn’t like your typical American amusement park. There weren’t rides and it was more about the surrounding scenery. I got to see how the large dams function. There are people up on the dams 24/7 in the control room, monitoring whenever they need to open or close the gates to allow water in. The gates usually stay open except for a few times every year. This happens when the tide is too strong and it becomes a danger to the citizens. Other than that, the gates must stay open so they do not disturb things such as mussel farms. The entire dam is essentially a large piston, and I think it is very impressive how they had to bring out large ships in order to build the dam after the flood. The entire park was surrounded by wind turbines as well, which makes me happy to see an effort to use renewable energy. I know that many people in America complain about the sound that they make but I think they are severely overreacting as these wind turbines were not noisy at all.

After a tour around the park, we got to go on a small cruise around the water and take in the scenery. I really wish I could have seen a whale, but I know that whales are very rare in the North Sea. The bus ride back to Amsterdam was very pretty, and I was amazed by the amount of flowers surrounding a golf course that we passed by. Anyways, it’s nice to be back in Amsterdam, and I am super excited to go to the flea market tomorrow!