Travelsmartplanet

About an hour from Amsterdam, you can immerse yourself in real living history, if you plan to spend a day in the country at the authentic Zuiderzee Museum in Enkhuizen  (www.zuiderzeemuseum.nl/en/home) which covers Dutch life from 1850-1932. The area was created with barrier dams and the reclamation of land, and then whole towns were moved here.

There’s a fishing harbour forming a coastal village with its stilt houses, a Church district with the sail-maker, barber, coopery, smithy, school – and a sweet shop which is still open.  The canal area has a wood-turner, paint workshop, pharmacy and theatre, and near the nature area – a working steam laundry – and yes, there’s both a dike and a windmill. Nearby, there’s an indoor museum in an old warehouse with a collection of wooden ships from the Dutch West India Company and some new art.

Zaanse Schans, 10 miles northwest of Amsterdam is easy to get to by train (4 stops), bus (#91) or car, and has no entrance fee (www.zaanseschans.nl). We lucked out and arrived on Windmill Day, so this open air museum with its six windmills was bustling, and we got to climb up all over them and learn how they work.

According to Marit Hendriksen, a spokeswoman for National Windmill Day in May, there are 1,156 mills officially listed, and the Dutch still love to go out and “meet the guys that work these things” which have been “the face of the country for so long”. Windmills were the very first factories, popular from1650-1850, and used to run machinery.

We got to meet Pete, whose family owns “De Kat”, which still makes paint pigments, probably the last wind powered dye mill in world. Windmills are run by those sails which must be turned to face the wind (which they can count on for only about half the year). Workers can regulate speed and use a brake on top which can make the mill stop in 15 sec. The other mills at Zaanse Schans press linseed oil, grind spices and cut wood.

The town buildings that surround the mill area are a bit touristy but are still an enjoyable visit. There’s a cheese maker, a bakery, a museum of the Dutch clock, a distillery, pewter foundry, cooper and you even get to see how wooden shoes are made.

When you are ready to explore Amsterdam, you would be surprised at the eclectic choices of other museums in town: the one for purses (Museum of Bags and Purses www.tassenmuseum.nl or  www.museumofbagsandpurses.com) shows off 4,000 of them. The houseboat museum (Woonboot Museum) is in a – houseboat – so you can get a peek into what life is like to live on one. There are still people living in about 10,000 of them all over the country  – they’re not inexpensive at $150,00-$500,000 Euros.

There’s even one for a taste of the Hermitage from Russia, but it is filled mostly with church relics and not those gorgeous paintings we were hoping for. The Jewish Historical museum (www.jhm.nl/english) is situated in  a complex of four former Ashkenazi synagogues. Besides the objects on display you pick up headphones and hear personal stories of holidays, the sabbath, services and family life.

We never made it to the Hash, Marihuana & Hemp Museum www.hashmuseum.com, the Tulip Museum or the Tattoo one but we did hit the Red Light district and the floating Singel Flower market. Around since 1862, the flowers used to come by boat and the stalls set on the edge of a canal are still full of tulips, geraniums, bulbs, plants, and tons of souvenirs.

A solemn reverent place is the Anne Frank Huis (www.annefrank.org) where, at 66 years after her death, it sports the longest lines and is worth the wait (go early). You walk behind the bookcase to the secret attic apartment where she lived with her sister Margot, her parents, and others. There are still pencil marks on wall marking her growth. Quotes are on the walls from her World War II diary, “I long to ride a bike, dance, whistle, look at the world, feel young and know that  I’m free”. She died in a concentration camp one month before liberation.

For a first quiet day in Amsterdam, head to the Rijksmuseum (www.rijksmuseum.nl) for the works of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, delftware and more and the  Van Gogh Museum (www.vangoghmuseum.nl), which are easy to double date as they are down the street from each other.

For free, in the garden of the Rijksmuseum, see if you can find the collection of sculptures and ruins in the form of building fragments from five centuries of Dutch architecture from Gothic pillars to city gates, a mishmash of pilasters, gables, lion masks and pieces of monuments from all over the city.

You can learn more about Rembrandt by visiting his home (www.rembrandthuis.nl) which he bought at the height of his fame in 1639 but lost to bankruptcy by 1656. In his studio you can watch a demonstration of how each day paints were made by his students, and there is an exhibition of his etchings.

The Ethnographic Open-Air Museum on the shore of Jugla Lake near Riga, Latvia is an outdoor exhibition of 16th-19th century farms, churches and a country inn (which also functioned as a community center for weddings, funerals, schools, etc.) offering a glimpse into life in the countryside. The plan was to establish a farm from the four regions, Kurzeme, Zemgale, Vidzeme and Latgale. In 1932 the museum was opened to the public and by 1939 there were 40 buildings erected. Today 118 buildings are on display.

Every other shop in Bruges, it seems, is a chocolate shop – 50 or so but who’s counting?  Bruges, known for its medievalness, has a playful side when it comes to tourist museums, with one for chocolate and another for fries. The chocolate museum started out as a private collection of everything to do with the history and making of chocolate.

You will learn that milk chocolate is 45% sugar, and that when chocolate made its way to Europe by the Spanish explorers, it was a drink with a secret recipe for making it – til the 1800’s. The process of conching was invented around then, which made it possible to create hardened chocolate for eating. You can see the cups they drank it in, and they sure were super-sized. Fries with that?

www.choco-story.be

Chips (fries) were  created in the US in 1852 in Saratoga, NY all because of a dissatisfied customer. When he complained to George Crum about his potato, Mr Crum sliced it into little pieces to annoy him. Instead he loved it! French fries were possibly misnamed during WWII when American soldiers, hearing Belgians eating fries and talking French, thought they were French food.

Potatoes around the world are covered too – see if you can find the pink and purple ones. If all this fry talk has gotten you a bit hungry, don’t worry, there’s a fries shop in the basement where you can have them with the traditional mayonnaise or pickle sauce, mustard or curry ketchup.

www.frietmuseum.be

Tags: Chocolate, conching, customer, french fries, George Crum, mayonnaise, medieval, Museum, potato, Saratoga, soldier, WWII

Holland was first with wind energy and now the  rest of us are playing catch up. If you want to see some of the original kind, it’s a quick 20 minutes from downtown Amsterdam to Zaanse Schans www.zaanseschans.nl

Windmills were built as mini factories making the products of daily life with free energy. At this outdoor museum, you can still see a half dozen of them making spices, paint, linseed oil and doing wood cutting. There’s an indoor museum, a cheese building, one for wooden shoes and village houses.

Tags: Amsterdam, energy, factories, linseed oil, Museum, paint, spices, windmill, wood, zaanse schans