We’ve now been in Europe for over a week! Time has flown by. We’d like to recap a few things we saw in the Netherlands because we haven’t posted about them yet.
Back when we were in the Netherlands, we visited a few storm barriers. While in southwest Holland, near Hoek van Holland, we saw the Maeslant barrier (part of the vast Delta Works dike system). In the event of a flood, this barrier protects the important trading city of Rotterdam. We learned many interesting facts about this structure from a guide: it was completed in 1997, it operates with ball-and-socket joints (each of which is 10 meters in diameter and weights 680 tons), the doors close automatically, and each door is as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall. Now that we’ve been up the Eiffel Tower, we have a better idea of the scale of this barrier. Below is a picture of a section of the wall.
We also saw some windmills in the Netherlands but didn’t get a closer look at them until we got to Brugge, Belgium. Windmills are generally considered Dutch even though the Dutch were not the ones to invent the technology. They were used to pump water out of lowlands back into rivers for farming purposes since the Netherlands is so much below sea level. They were also depicted in art quite often.
Our bus driver, Joop, gave us some information about the numbers of windmills as we were driving from the airport to the hotel in Amsterdam. He told us that there used to be around 8000 windmills in the Netherlands, but there are now only about 800. The city keeps building around them so that the wind cannot get at them as well anymore.
Although we did not go see any windmills in Amsterdam, some us went to see two old-fashioned windmills located on the outskirts of Brugge. The blades of the old ones are much different than the new windmill’s blades. They have an open, netting type of material on half of the blade as opposed to the solid blades of the modern ones, and the supporting structure looked a bit like a barn. Below is a picture of one of the old-fashioned windmills we saw in Brugge.
