After spending our final night in Amsterdam, it was time to pack our things and eat one last delicious hotel breakfast. We hopped on the bus at around 10:00 AM, and first headed northwest to Zaanse Schans. At Zaanse Schans, we were given a brief tour and lesson on how cheese was made at Henri Willig. We then had the opportunity to explore a recreation of a traditional Dutch village from around the mid-1800s which featured buildings, stores, and a string of waterfront windmills. Unfortunately, the way timings worked out left us with three extra hours to spend, and I ended up wandering into the nearby city of Zandijk. After boarding the bus, we left the area of North Holland and arrived in Rotterdam, South Holland. Our new hotel was presented as a “hostel”, but is very hotel-like inside. The hotel’s location is ideal as it is right next to Rotterdam Centraal Station, which means we have convenient access to not only Rotterdam but also other cities in Holland. Upon arriving in Rotterdam, exhaustion had caught up to me and I ended up sleeping in the hotel room for several hours.

Another observation that I made today relates to how the Dutch deal with differences in water level. What I mean by this is that most of the Netherlands lies below sea level, which is a problem when there is an entire ocean’s worth of water at risk of flooding out the country. For this reason, the Dutch have spent centuries perfecting water control. Today, the water level is carefully monitored across the country to ensure that no major flooding incident occurs. The most basic way to stop water from flooding into other areas is through the use of levees or dykes (djkes in Dutch), dams (as in Amster-dam –> Dam on the river Amstel) and locks. This system was easy to observe today while touring Zaanse Schans, where the water level in the river Zaan was visibly higher than the low marsh and buildings on the other side of the road embankment. After doing some more research on my own, it appears that to keep the land from flooding, the Dutch use tiered “lakes” to control the general water level. We will learn more about this on the Delta Works visit.

Another point of comparison between the United States and the Netherlands is how distances are completely warped here when applying American perceptions of distances. Looking at a map of the Netherlands, going from Amsterdam to Rotterdam is effectively “crossing the country”, which gives off a feeling of distance and long travel times. The drive from New Jersey to Pittsburgh is already close to six hours, and that’s hardly even crossing a fraction of the United States. However, the reality is that Rotterdam was only a quick 1-hour drive away from Amsterdam. In fact, the cities are so close that they could be reached by high-speed rail in just over 45 minutes. The distance from Amsterdam Centraal to Rotterdam Centraal is approximately 1 hour by road. To put that into perspective, the total time it takes to get from my house in Bergen County, New Jersey (across the Hudson river from Manhattan) to JFK Airport in Queens, New York is about one hour as well (with no traffic!!). That means in the time it takes to travel between two of the largest cities in the Netherlands, I wouldn’t have even made it out of the New York metropolitan area. The idea of two cities being so incredibly close to each other yet acting like they are hundreds of miles apart is completely foreign to me. I now understand why many people joke that the Netherlands is one big city.

Overall, the experience at Zaanse Schans was enjoyable and the windmills were interesting, but I felt as if the whole town had too many tourists and the shops were so money-hungry such that I was not able to get the intended “historical” immersion. I am excited to spend more time in Rotterdam over the coming week.