Day 10 was quite educational and thought-provoking!

Our day started with an 8:20am private bus ride (no breakfast for me yet again as I made it down just in time!) to Deltapark Neeltje Jans, a museum that explains the history of the creation of the Delta Works bridges. There, we learned about the disastrous flood of 1953 in the Netherlands and the steps that the government took to prevent the effects of similar disastrous floods in the future. We saw a very interesting and informative documentary of the creation of the Oosterscheldekerig, the largest of the Delta Works bridges; I learned that this bridge was the most difficult and expensive of all of the Delta Works bridges and took approximately ten years to build. The bridge has sliding concrete gates that lower at the time of an impeding flood, blocking the whitewater from mixing with the shallower water and causing homes and other facilities to flood. When the gates close, the shallower water no longer mixes with the rest of the ocean water and becomes freshwater; the Oosterscheldekerig gate design is thus helpful to the environment as it preserves biodiversity and is still useful to farmers even during floods. While significantly more expensive to build than the bridge we learned about at the Zuiderzeemuseum, the Delta Works’s Oosterscheldekerig provides more benefits to farmers and promotes biodiversity and is thus more sustainable in the long run.

After finishing our indoor tour and learning about the history of the Oosterscheldekerig inside of the museum, we continued the second half of our tour outside. We explored different remnants and/or recreations of the machines used to build the bridge and parts of the actual bridge themselves, including a vibrating needle on the mooring boat that was used to compact the sea clay to set the mattress on top of it and the scooper of the machine used to pour rocks around the pillars to keep them in place. I was impressed by the sheer size of each component that went into building the bridge–the bridge construction must have required a lot of energy to manufacture! We also explroed some of the museum’s other outside attractions, including the interactive weight-machine with which we could experience lifting the approximate weight that the bridge workers would lift multiple times every day and the bouncy, Jello-shaped trampoline that we all enjoyed jumping on!

We then went back inside for lunch, which was provided by the museum itself. I lunched on quite the interesting spread of cold bread, vegan cheese, vegan butter, apricot jam, and a vegan croquette, which is has to be one of my least favorite lunches so far. We then all went on a boat cruise which circled across the nearby sea, where I enjoyed taking close-up pictures and videos of the many wind turbines. Once we got back to the museum, we had around 1.5 hours to explore the rest of the museum on our own. A couple of friends and I first went to the Delta Experience, which is the story of the Flood of 1953 told through the lens of a 12-year-old survivor in a 4D setting; we entered a dark replica of the girl’s bedroom where we were met with wind and screams, followed by another room with a large screen that showed us an animation of the girl’s parents attempting to line the front of their house with heavy sandbags while the girl tried to escape her flooding house. The mini-film ended with the shortened story of the creation of the Oosterscheldekerig; while the film was probably meant to be hopeful, it was still quite jarring and emphasized the importance of dikes and other flood-preventive structures.

After going through the Delta Experience, we walked outside to the wind tunnel in which we got to experience winds as high as 130kmph so as to glimpse the winds that occured during the Flood of 1953. We then continued to walk around outside and explored some of the museum’s other attractions before we all took our private bus back to Rotterdam. Dr. Kerzmann and Dr. Dukes offered to buy us all dinner at Biergarten, where I dined on decent-for-a-bar flatbread and hummus. I also ordered a non-alcoholic spritz, which I must say I will not be getting again! After our long dinner, we finally came back to our hostel for the night!

Today was a packed but exciting day, with a cherry on top for the fact that I did not spend ANY of my own money! I am looking forward to our site visits and the Markthal tomorrow!