I was very excited for this day of our trip, as we were going to visit a cheese manufacturer called Henri Willig, and I love cheese. After a breakfast at the hotel and a train ride to get there, we arrived at the home of the cheese manufacturer, the neighborhood of Zaanse Schans. Zaanse Schans is a neighborhood in the town of Zaandam, which is near Amsterdam. It has historic windmills and green wooden houses that were made to look like an 18th or 19th century village in the Netherlands. It also had very green fields of reclaimed land and nice small canals. With the beautiful scenery surrounding us, it was now time to visit the cheese maker.

We entered the shop and were given some history of how Henri Willig began making cheese. It was explained that Henri Willig focuses on animal welfare and environmental sustainability when making and selling its products. This is very important because many large companies are focused on making money without considering the harm that they could be doing. The company also reuses residual products, which increases its sustainability overall. We were then told how the cheese gets made. Different types of milk are stirred, then rennet is added, then the cheese is stirred more until there are curds and whey, and then the curds are formed into wheels of cheese which are then salted and dried. The process was very cool to learn about, and it was cool to see that the company cared about sustainability, even if they didn’t outright say it as if they were advertising that fact.

We soon left Zaanse Schans and took a ferry to the Zuiderzee museum. The Zuiderzee was a body of water in the Netherlands that was gradually made smaller over time due to many dikes being made. The Zuiderzee museum is a museum that is in the form of a small village that represents what life was like around the Zuiderzee around the time of 1905, before dikes started being made to reclaim land from the water. The water was saltwater around this time, and then later turned into freshwater, which caused many changes in the culture around the area. There were actors playing parts of people living during the time, and there were many people at stations doing various jobs that people would have been doing during that time, like shoveling coal into a steam engine, running laundry through a wringer, and making ropes. Seeing how the culture was different depending on the environment around it was interesting.