Care for a smoke? (fish or eel, that is)

We left the village of Volendam in two groups, the short-ride group on the ferry (Wm.) and the long ride group by bike (Pat) to go to the island of Marken. On the way we biked through Monnickendam, a small village founded by monks. After the passage to the North Sea was closed by the dam which created the Ijsselmeer, the villagers had to change from a sea-fishing vocation to a lake-fishing vocation. These are mackerel (and below eel) that are typically caught in the Ijsselmeer and smoked in this place in Monnickendam using pine wood. We also tried some raw herring which is served with raw onions, and some smoked herring. Not something I'd eat every day, but not bad.

The island of Marken is connected to the shore by a dike road. It's known for the houses built on stilts to withstand floods from storms and for the villagers who typically wear elaborate costumes. This is the vest from a woman's costume. The printed fabric on the front is typically batik brought from the Far East (historically by Dutch East India Co. traders) and used to ornament the plain striped fabric on the sides.

This wa the first day on the job for this 16-year-old girl from Marken, who worked in a house serving as a demonstration of what the typical Marken home looked like in the past. An old lady died and left her home as a sort of museum for visitors. The most interesting thing was the beds, which were located in small open cupboards in the wall which could be closed by curtains and which were about 4 feet off the ground. People slept sitting up, so the cupboards were short. Under the adult bed cupboard was a small hole in the wall leading to another, smaller cupboard on the floor, where the children slept.

These are two sisters, ages 82 and 78, who run the museum on Marken. They said on the whole island there are only 4 or 5 women left who wear typical costumes these days and they are all dying out. To be authentically dressed, each woman must make her own costume, and they are quite elaborate. If you come to Marken in a few years all you'll see is someone like the young girl above, dressed in a commercially made costume solely for the benefit of the tourist trade. Sad, but a sign of modern progress.

Typical very old Dutch house -- made of wood. They're usually painted green or black. Black was original color and came from tar applied to the wood to waterproof it. This house is on the island of Marken, where houses were built on stilts because the dike was low and the island occasionally flooded during storms.

The lighthouse at Marken. The ship in the left background has the traditional brown sails. In the olden days the sailors coated their cloth sails with tar to prevent them from wearing out soon. Traditional ships still use brown sails in honor of that history. We saw many, many two and three-masted sailing ships on the Ijsselmeer.

This is how you get your bike down from a dike. We were riding along the top of the dike to the village of Marken but needed to use the road in the foreground. Next to the steps is a small gutter on each side. You run the bike wheels down the gutter while you descend the stairs. Somewhat tricky but doable.

Typical 17th century Dutch house (but the light blue color not so typical. The door in the front is called a death door. It has no steps leading to it and no handle. Opens only from the inside and is traditionally used only on two occasions: 1) Death -- the body is removed from the house through this door and 2) Marriage -- The bride exits her family home through this door, marriage being symbolically like a death in that the bride leaves her home and family and must start a new life.

99 Delft tiles in a church, telling the story of the Bible from creation to second coming. Because people couldn't read, the pastor used the tiles to illustrate his message and to provide a way for the people to understand the Bible.

We are now back in Amsterdam, where William and I have one more free day before we catch a train to Dresden, Germany. We'll visit a commercial laundromat first thing to get our clothes washed in a better fashion than our wash-in-the-sink biking mode, and then do a bit of tourism, Amsterdam-style. Probably won't blog again til we're in Germany, if then, depending on internet access.

We had a raucous farewell party last night on the barge, as it was the last night our guides were with us on the boat. They did a biking tourist-style skit for us and we sang a couple of song parodies in honor of our trip. It was truly a fun experience, and I can't think of a better way to see the country. I'd highly recommend it. Doesn't require a buff body, as you can elect to stay on the barge all day, bike the short route with lots of stops for photos and/or coffee and/or treats, or the longer route, which also has stops for info on what you're seeing, as well as lunch and coffee stops. We'd do it again in a heartbeat and may, indeed, return for another trip on a different route through the Netherlands.

Lakefront rooms for free

We are in Volendam, a village once known for fishing but now mostly a tourist town on the shores of the Ijsselmeer. On the way to Volendam, we cycled through Hoorn, a former Dutch East India Company village. Quite picturesque (first two photos from below). AThe third photo is for inspiration to those who say biking is difficult. It's a kindergarten teacher who is pedalling with SIX children in the compartment in the front of her bike. And if it's a typical Dutch bike, it has only one gear, so she's really working.

The two photos above the kindergarten teacher are from Edam, of Edam cheese fame. (For extra info, Edam is a type of cheese with less fat than Gouda and may be produced anywhere in Holland. The name refers to the fat content, not the city of origin.)

The last photos (or first, if you count from the top) are from Volendam.First is a large cruise ship flying the Red Cross flag. While we were walking about in Volendam we noticed a lot of folks in wheelchairs. The reason is that the ship is one of two operated by the Dutch Red Cross that takes disabled people in the last year or so of life out for excursions. While the ship's crew is salaried, all the caregivers are volunteers, and there are two caregivers for each disabled person. One can be a family member and the other is someone else (RN or other medical personnel) who volunteers to help. This is done free of cost to make the end days of these people happier. What a lovely idea!

The photo of the ship and of the paintings relate to the title of this blog posting. One of the reasons Volendam is well known relates to the fact that in the past artists came here and stayed in one of the local lakefront hotels for free, painting local people as they went about their daily village life (in costume in the past, not so much anymore). The paintings are displayed in the hotel today, along with models of ships commonly used in the past. I couldn't resist snapping a couple of photos of paintings involving local women knitting. It's for my friends in the Knot Club.

Today we cycle to Marken, another picturesque lakeside village and then back to Amsterdam. Tomorrow we have a free day in Amsterdam and then, alas, our bike saga is finished. More tomorrow.

By the Sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea

Today we start with a geography lesson. I uploaded a map of our tripk but on my computer it's so small you may not be able to see the arrows indicating our trip progress. We started at Amsterdam, travelling southeast as far as Kinderdijk (windmills), then turned west to den Haag, then north as far as the island of Texel. Now we're on the downside, heading back to Amsterdam tomorrow evening. Right now we're travelling along the side of the Ijsselmeer (Ijssel Lake), which was created in 1932 when the Dutch built a dam across the Zuiderzee (Southern Sea), enclosing the water and turning what was a sea (i.e. ocean access) into a lake (freshwater). This facilitated travel from the eastern states of the NL to the west and also created the possibility of making new land for farming and settlement. After the dam was complete, then they started building dikes to enclose and drain the lakebed, first along the left side and then along the right. Eventually by 1968 there were 5 polders drained from the sea. Today we biked along the dike that encloses the polders on the west side of the Ijsselmeer. The man you see is the stationmaster of the city of Twesk, which contains many lovely historic homes. Although they may look new in my photos, these houses date from the time of the Dutch East India company, as Twesk was once a seaside village home to wealthy sea captains. We stopped by a home undergoing renovations and our guide asked about how the process was going. The home owner, a wealthy businessman, came out and gave us a tour of the place. It's costing him 600,000 euros to redo the outside and roof (about $800,000) and he gets a tax credit for this, since the home is 300 years old and is being renovated to duplicate the historic appearance, including thatched roof.
It will cost him additional funds to do the inside but he won't get tax breaks for that. Since the house cost him only 500,000 euros originally, he's losing money but he doesn't mind, since he wants to live in a historic home in a historic town.

After we left Twesk we cycled along the shore of the Ijsselmeer all the way to Enkhuizen, a former Dutch East India Company town. All along the way we saw modern and historic sailing ships along the Ijsselmeer. It's still quite large and very beautiful. The photos of the two guys wearing aprons are our cook, Simon, and mate, Paddy, serving dinner. They dress up funny with different aprons for different occasions. Paddy's apron has a sheep head covering a sensitive place -- because we were on the island of Texel, where there are more sheep than people. Not quite sure why Simon chose to wear one with women's underwear....

Forgot to mention it above and this program erases forward as you edit, so can't put it back up there, but the reason I took the photo of the stationmaster is that he's wearing klompen (wooden shoes). Farmers still wear them -- it doesn't hurt if a cow steps on your foot, they're not damaged if you walk in a cow pie, you just let it dry and hose it off...

Today we have a shorter bike trip than the 72 km. originally planned, primarily because it's over 90 degrees here and they're worried it will be too strenuous. So the short group (not me) will ride the barge all the way to our next stop, Vollendam, and then do a short 8 km. bike tour to Edam. The longer group (me, not William -- sore knees) will bike the 45 km. distance from here at Enkhuizen to Edam and then on to Vollendam.

See you tomorrow...

How to tip a sheep

We're on Texel, one of the Netherlands' barrier islands to the north of the country. Starting from the bottom of the photos, Texel is a fishing town. This is a photo of only a few of the town's fishing boats tied up for a Sundeay rest. In fact, so many fishing boats were tied up that we had to moor alongside one and cross their deck before leaping across a small void onto the dock. Coincidentally the ship to which we are tied flies a Jolly Roger (pirate) flag. Don't see any pirates, though.

The next photo above is of a row of fisherman's houses, small and very quaint. They face the shore side of the island, where they are protected from North Sea storms and are also protected by a very tall dike on the leeward side of the island. The third photo shows a row of wooden shoes lined up on the doorstop of one of the fishing cottages.

Above that are two photos of the "hippie bus" we passed while biking. There are a lot of artists on the island, who have small stands outside their homes, selling homemade crafts.

Above that is a photo of the Georgian (Russian) cemetery on the island. there were around 800 Georgian soldiers taken captive early on in WWII during the blitzkrieg and brought to Texel as German prisoners of war. Of these 800, around 500 survived the trip to Texel. During the war, as Texel was somewhat removed from the brunt of the fighting and since the prisoners were on an island, they had a somewhat "normal" life. Some of them fell in love with local girls and even fathered children. As the war wound down they began to worry, since Stalin considered Russian POWs to be traitors and the Georgian soldiers were afraid of being imprisoned when repatriated to Russia. They saw that Southern Netherlands was being liberated. They decided to revolt against their German captives. The Germans, on the other hand, although they knew their country was being defeated, decided to go out in a blaze of glory by fighting against the Georgians, and a very bloody battle resulted. Over 400 Georgians, many local folks and a couple of hundred Germans were killed. Two weeks later the Netherlands was liberated. Of the 800 original prisoners only 200 remained alive. Those who died are commemorated in this park, with each rose representing a dead Georgian.

Now about the sheep (last photo). The fence around the sheep is made of branches and weeds tied together and placed in rows, surrounded by mud. This provides a more beautiful background for people to see and also provides a home for mice and other creatures of the field. This type of fencing is being erected more and more in the Netherlands. What were told about the sheep is this: If a sheep falls down onto its back (not its side), it is unable to get back up and will eventually die within about 2 hours' time. So we were told that if we saw a sheep lying on its back, we should immediately run out into the field and turn it onto its side, sort of a sheep resuscitation move. (No mouth-to-mouth involved -- tee hee) But one must turn the sheep back into the direction from which it fell, as if you turn it the other way, the internal organs will become twisted and the sheep will die. In fact, the first full day of biking we came across a dead sheep, presumably one who had fallen and couldn't get back up in time.

So now you know all we know about sheep tipping.

We sail back to the mainland around 4:30 today to catch the tides. The inland sea on the leeward side of the island is tidal and we must catch the high tide. More tomorrow.

Who said Holland was flat?

We started the day leaving Alkmaar, headed north to the uppermost northern area of the Netherlands. Here's a better photo of the cheese weighing house in Alkmaar than the one I posted yesterday, since the light was now coming from the right direction.
All during our bike rides, if our guides saw something they thought we'd be interested in, we'd stop and have a mini-lesson, even if it meant they had to knock on the door of a perfect stranger and ask then some questions. This was a mini-lesson on the wildflowers along the way. To the Dutch, everything has a use. They pick and dry the reeds that grow wild along the canals, bundle them and make thatch for thatch-roofed houses, trim branches off the willow trees, bundle them and use them to reinforce the sides of canals and to be a bottom layer when building dikes, and pick herbs and flowers from the fields to be added to their cheeses. One of our new favorite cheeses is stinging nettle cheese.

We stopped at a cheese farm to learn how cheese is made. This farmer is scooping out the cheese curds to place them in a mold and press them down to form a cheese wheel. We bought a couple of small cheese wheels. If you're in the area, you can come by our house and get a taste of plain Gouda-style cheese or stinging nettle cheese.

William and I just hanging around with one of the (inantimate) cows on the farm.

The farmer has 40 cows, which he milks twice daily. Since he makes cheese only twice a week he sells the rest of the milk to the dairy. While US dairies pay by the amount of milk, European dairies pay by the fat and protein content of the milk.

This next photo belongs at the end. Oops! Just read to the end and then come back to this one.

After biking through the dunes to the northernmost point of the Netherlands, we loaded the bikes on the barge and sailed to the island of Texel, where we will spend Sunday.

If you look closely you'll see that this is a ski slope. It's a hill shorter than the hill we live on, but they've made it a ski club with a rope tow and artificial turf something like plastic onto which they put some slippery liquid to make it slick. It's one of two ski areas in Holland. Very funny.

Because we're here so late in the year we didn't see many flowers in the field. This is a field of iris that we passed on the way to the ship.

This is what the Dutch call "the wasp." It's part of the nationwide system to protect the country from floods caused by storms in the North Sea. The land near the seacoast is protected by sand dunes, which were deposited over time from the sea, but the dunes in some places aren't high enough to keep storm floodwaters out, since the country is below sea level. This particular area has a 44' high reinforced concrete dike to prevent flooding, and this wasp thing runs from the dike out to sea, constantly measuring the force of the tides, the depth of the water and the force of the wind. It's sort of an early warning system for flooding.

Along the seawall for 10 km. is a flat, wide bike path, wide enough to accommodate something like 30 bikes alongside each other. I had ridden ahead of our troup and caught this picture of the rest of the "long" group coming to the end of this 10 km. stretch. There were fierce headwinds the entire day as we rode from south to north, so riding 10 km. (6.1 miles to you, Jan R) is a lot harder than it seems, especially since before and after this flat 10 km. there were hills up and down, all with headwinds.

Countryside and Cheese (again!)

Every town has drawbridges over the canals, some 12000 of them in the entire country. Some, like this one, are manually operated.

Looks like we're in Venice. There was an authentic-looking Venetian gondola parked outside this building, complete with striped pole at the pier.

Alkmaar is a really pretty old town.

Since houses were taxed by their width at street level, sometimes they were built with each floor wider than the lower one.

Evening shot of the cheese market building and museum.

Almshouse (housing for the poor) in Alkmaar. These houses are present in every town and consist of small apartments (24 here) surrounding a garden area. In times past the garden would have had a well and been herbs and other useful plants. Nowadays they are usually only decorative, but they are still used to house the poor and widowers/widows.

Ice cream stop for the "long ride" group on the way to Alkmaar. The woman to my left is Jannika, one of our guides.

Wm. at the statue of Hans Brinker, holding his finger in the dike. This is, of course, fictional, as dikes are not walls but thick rock and earthen berms between fields of different elevations. It wouldn't do much good to stick one's finger in a dike to prevent leaks.

The "new" St Bavo's catholic church in Haarlem. (see explanation below).

As we left Haarlem we cycled by the "new" St. Bavo's church, built in the late 1880's. The original St. Bavo's is the church with the 5000-pipe organ we saw the first day in the Netherlands. After the Reformation, all dcatholic churches had the murals, statues of saints, etc. removed (graven images) and were renamed, usually "great church" or something similar, as naming a church for a saint was associated with catholicism. So Haarlem built a new St. Bavo's church, which is pictured in today's uploads. It combines several architectural styles and is quite beautiful.

After Haarlem we cycled through some hilly areas with large mansions built by the merchant class which became rich during Holland's heyday. Huge, beautiful homes with extraordinary gardens. Then we crossed by ferry over a very large canal built to link the port of Amsterdam directly west to the North Sea. We cycled through a lot of farmland, some dunes near the coast and finally came to our night stop in Alkmaar. On the way we passed the statue of the fictional character, Hans Brinker (see above).

Alkmaar is a lovely town. Small enough to walk through easily but big enough to have a variety of areas to see. It's the site of the cheese market that you may have seen on Dutch tourist photos. Every Friday a.m. the farmers in the surrounding area bring their cheeses to the town square, where they are sampled by and sold to cheese brokers. Everyone's in costume and it's quite festive. We got here too late in the day to see it. You can see the photo above of the cheese weighing house and museum, which is quite beautiful. (Poor photo -- sorry but the sun was setting behind it so the detail is lost in the photo. Will lighten it up on my computer at home, but for now you just see the silhouette.) Today we are off to the far north of the Netherlands to stay overnight on an island.

Alkmaar is the home of the remaining active cheese guild. It's the place where you may have seen photos of cheeses stacked all over the marketplace and being carried on large wooden sled-type devices by men in costume. Every Friday morning they have a cheese market, where the cheeses from the local area are sampled by buyers and sold on the market square. We got here too late in the day to see it

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