Dutch Windmills, Cheese and Clogs!

This is the town of Schaanz something or other :)  ...it's a little tourist place that's famous for it's 'working mills'...

This area used to have hundreds of windmills and now there are only six left.  They crushed spices, coffee and chocolate from Dutch trade with the world...

The one we're going into still makes peanut oil...

by crushing them...

The Netherlands is a REALLY flat country (in French it's called 'the Low Countries', so true, so true)...

So Holland is the name of a region or state in the Netherlands...right now we're in North Holland...

Dak-Dak (Byebye) Windmills!

And on the road again...it's just SO flat here...and they were explaining how you have to constantly pump water out of these places...if they didn't the Netherlands would lose 1/2 (?) of it's land!  Crazy!  I am just amazed at...well, one the gall to say "see that lake over there...I'm going to build a wall of earth around it...then suck out all the water (several weeks)...then I'll plant reeds to get out the rest of the water...then I'll put cows on it for 2 years cuz the land won't bear any more weight than that...then I'll build a house on it and hope that the sea doesn't rage in during a storm.."  I just find that thinking crazy!  But they did it!

This is Volendam...an old historical fishing village...that after horrible floods in 1913 they build a dyke that closed it off from the sea (to protect it) but then the fish couldn't get in and the village's fisheries died off...

it's also a Catholic village, which I found strange in VERY Protestant Netherlands...

Now we're going to learn how to make cheese...

Genius to bring weary, tired and HUNGRY travellers right before lunch time to a cheese factory :)  The samples were delicious!  and lots of people bought a lot!

Volendam...

Now we're going out to the 'former island' of Marken...after they built the dyke in 1913 Marken is connected with the land and lost it's fishing ability as well...

Looks Swedish or Norwegian to me...

And now...for the clog factory!

Here she is making one...they make them out of poplar wood...which oddly enough is very wet and easy to carve, but then once it dries out after 2 weeks is impervious to moisture...she explained the whole tradition of how if a guy likes a girl he carves a pair of clogs, leaves them on her doorstep and if they are gone in the morning, that means 'yes'.  Her dad did this THREE times with her mother and then finally she gave in HAHAH!

Goodbye Marken!