Today, we left Amsterdam to learn more about the traditional culture of Holland in the village of Zaanse Schans and to explore a forgotten way of life at the Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen–both North of Amsterdam. Zaanse Schans was a wonderfully preserved village full of craftsmen’s shops, farms for grazing cattle, goats, and sheep, windmills for pumping water out of the polders, and dikes that held the river at bay from the lower farmland just feet away from it. Here, we visited a Henri Willig store full of traditional cheesemaking tools and watched a demonstration on how Henri Willig makes their cheese. One interesting detail from the process is that the cheeses actually have to be constantly rotated during their aging so that the salt from their salt brine (an earlier step) will distribute itself evenly through the cheese. In terms of the resources needed to create cheese–it takes roughly 10 liters of milk to produce one kilogram of cow cheese–which seems like a lot, but the cheese-making process also preserves the milk in a form that is much harder to spoil. Henri Willig also uses byproducts to create other goods to sell, such as beer made from the whey. From our pre-departure meetings, I know that Henri Willig is working to install photovoltaic panels on the roof of their factories as well as implement longer periods between calving to lower the footprint of their product.

After some time exploring Zaanse Schans, which was full of baby ducklings and other birds due to it being just after breeding season, we left for the Zuiderzee Museum. Zuiderzee means South Sea in English. Up until 1932, it was exactly that–a saltwater sea connected to the North Sea that experienced tides and frequently flooded the lands around it. However, after a particularly bad flood in 1916, construction began on the Afsluitdijk, which was completed in 1932. This dike turned the sea into a freshwater lake now known as the Ijsselmeer, or the Ijssel Lake. Major tracts of land were able to be reclaimed using dikes, polders, and pumps, which drastically changed the landscape. As we learned in the museum, this was a double-edged sword.

Although homes no longer flooded and people could safely live around the Ijsselmeer, their livelihoods and culture were destroyed. The region relied heavily on the fishing of saltwater fish like herring, anchovies, and shrimp–which defined not just the jobs of the fishermen but the lives of their families as well, who had to help repair tools, process the fish, and more. We got to see the small houses these families lived in, with one to two rooms, thatched or clay tile roofs, and extremely small doors. One interesting fact is that houses were built even on the wrong side of the dikes surrounding the Zuiderzee because the residents were able to pay lower rent due to the flooding risk. I think that an important lesson to be learned from the damming of the Zuiderzee is that all technological and infrastructure advancements have unforeseen consequences and do not inherently benefit everyone equitably. This is something that we, as engineers, have to make sure of.

Finally, after returning to Amsterdam, I went with some friends to listen to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (RCO) perform Mahler’s 6th Symphony in Vondelpark. This performance was livestreamed for free by the orchestra from the Concertgebouw (literally Concert Building in English) to the park. The performance was wonderful, and Mahler’s 6th is one of my favorites. I love the little Glockenspiel melody in the first movement as well as the xylophone interjections. This symphony has ridiculous orchestration with 2 harps, 8 horns, 4 trombones, 6 trumpets, celesta, two timpani players, and an extremely large wooden hammer among the standard strings and large numbers of woodwinds–it’s badass. This performance is part of a larger festival held by the RCO in which they are playing all 10 of Mahler’s symphonies in a row. I would have loved to see Mahler’s 2nd, unfortunately, it was the day we landed in Amsterdam, and it just wasn’t in the cards. Vondelpark was fantastic–better than Amstelpark–and had huge roads for bikers and pedestrians to share. The park was packed, and the atmosphere was wonderful. Until soon!