Today we bid a bittersweet goodbye to Amsterdam and left bright and early for the University of Twente in Enschede. During the ~2.5 hour drive, I was excited to see many of the tiny cars I had been introduced to in Amsterdam. I love seeing them because they just look so silly and cute. They’re so small they have a speed limit of 45km/hr. Its like seeing a little weiner dog next to two wolfdogs, I just get a bit of cute ness aggression about them. Later on in this day, I learned the drivers of these cars are sterotyped as performative by most Dutch people, so theres a bit of pity for being pathetic mixed in there too. Anyways, they’re also very sustainable and fuel efficient because of how small they are and I’ve notice they’re typically electric, so bonus points for them!

Enno also told us about the landbridges, or ecoducts, built over highways all across the Netherlands. These bridges have been built to protect animals from the highway, providing a safe passage over the highway for animals to get to the other side of the road. This bridge protects drivers, protects the wildlife & environment, and promotes biodiversity all in one structure, making them something for the dutch to be proud of implementing all throughout the country. Unfortunately, I was not able to take a picture of them while driving because we passed them too quickly, so I have attached an image from online instead.

As soon as we got to the University of Twente, we were given a campus tour followed by a quick lesson on the main natural water filtration system of Twente, the Kristalbad. The Kristalbad is a water filtration and retention system used by the region of Twente. After water has been chemically cleaned and filtered, it enters the Kristalbad to be naturall filtered one more time before reentering the enivironment’s natural streams and rivers. The system is so large that is also serves as a home for many of the animals of the area, such as birds, fish, bugs, and many other critters. We were lucky enough to see baby ducklings while we were visting! (You can see them a little bit in the background of my last picture :]) The entire time we were at the Kristalbad I felt like I was in a very quaint park – other pedestrians and animals were treating it like one too – so I would say that the design was very successful at naturalling integrating into the environment. This topic was a bit more on the environmental side of engineering rather than mechanical, but I still found the cleverness of this design to be very interesting.