Today we visited Zuiderzeemuseum, an indoor and outdoor museum showcasing the culture of the Zuiderzee region of the Netherlands. This museum had many outdoor buildings showing how the people of this region used to live, which was obviously interesting. One of these regions showed how they smoked fish, at which I was able to try Heron for the first time (It was good, but the bones were annoying to deal with). At this station I also learned that many of the fish that were traditionally caught in this area are no longer living in the lake. This is because, due to the dams and such created for flood control, this area was cut off from the ocean. With time, the area slowly transformed from saltwater to freshwater, meaning that any fish living in the area would slowly die off. This reminded me of the concept of sustainability, and our need to have a balanced relationship with the environment. Damming this area definitely had a negative impact on the local environment, as it killed much of the life living here. However, this came at the benefit of having much more control over the water level for the country as well as being more able to prevent flooding. Not only does this make life safer for the people living in the Netherlands, it can also help prevent other environmental disasters. For example, if a chemical manufacturer got flooded, this could potentially have disastrous effects on the environment as well. Because of this, I think it was a reasonable choice to build the dams and flood control, but I wonder if they could have done that without destroying the ecosystem. We should have to destroy one ecosystem to potentially save another.

Something else that I found interesting about this visit was the Dutch language itself. Since we are in the Netherlands, it is obvious that almost everything would be in Dutch, making it impossible to read most things. This is not a fault of the museum, obviously, as that’s their language and they did have many things in English and other languages as well. What I find odd about is this is one of the first times where this has been a real issue. In many of the places we have visited, namely those in Amsterdam, a lot of the information we needed could also be found in English or other languages. This is kind of like how back home most people (at least in my area) speak English, but many things have the same information in Spanish. Not only is it odd to be on the other side of this, but how prepared people seem to be to encounter other languages. This makes sense though, as not only are we visited more “touristy” areas, Europe has a much greater variety of different languages than America, so people have to be prepared to encounter someone who speaks a different language. I wonder how this would change if we visited a less visited area, as those people wouldn’t have to deal with tourists and the like as much. I doubt that they would be as patient as the people I’ve meet so far.