Zuiderzeemuseum

On Saturday the IES group set out for a day excursion to the Zuiderzeemuseum in a lakeside town north of the city called Enkhuizen. The Zuiderzee is a little village that has been recreated to look like an old-fashioned fishing town from the 1600s. The houses that are there were literally picked up from all over the coast to be set up and preserved at the museum.

The village is supposed to represent how people lived around the Ijsselmeer (a large lake in central Holland) up until the early 20th century. You can look into nearly all of the houses to see what shops, homes, and schoolrooms looked like, and you can watch craftsmen make tools or fishing nets as they would have back in the day. It’s sort of like a Dutch Colonial Williamsburg. You can even rent period costumes to wander around in for the day.

Or rent period costumes and force your small children to wander around in them for the day.

We rode on a bus for about an hour and a half to get all the way out to Enkhuizen. Then our program treated us to lunch at a rustic (but very nice) restaurant where I had my first traditional Dutch treat: hagelslag. Hagelslag are sprinkles, meant to be served on toasted bread with butter. It sounded bizarre to me and it kind of is, but it’s also surprisingly tasty (you were right, Emily!). Unlike American sprinkles, which are mostly just sweet, bland, colored bits of wax, hagelslag are actually flavored. The colored ones taste like fruit and the brown ones are really made of chocolate, and they’re a quintessential snack food here in the Netherlands. I’ll definitely bring some back with me to the states.

An old-fashioned candy store in the village.

It does not sell hagelslag.

After lunch we got a guided tour of the village and then explored for awhile on our own. One of the best rooms in the village had been spray painted in imitation of the traditional blue-and-white Delft porcelain that Holland is so famous for. The depicted subjects had a decidedly modern spin: cars, planes, and provocative pin-up girls joined the more traditional patterns of flowers and windmills.

Modern "Delftware."

No seaman's room would be complete without a kitschy picture of fish ogling The Birth of Venus.

Old-fashioned handmade fishing nets.

We finished the tour and crossed the village to get on a boat for a cruise around the lake. While we were waiting, our Chantal and Eva came around with Dutch treat number two: smoked herring. Pickled herring is what the Netherlands are actually famous for (I think they invented it, to be precise), but in a fishing village like Zuiderzee they would have smoked the herring as well, and had several shacks devoted entirely to smoked fish. The strangest thing about the herring is the way it’s served – you get the entire fish, scales and all, just sliced down the middle so you can pick the meat off the sides. I thought it tasted pretty good, but I’ll take hagelslag over herring any day.

It's hard to see, but the dark figures were black mannequins that were supposed to represent all the widows waiting for husbands who would never make it back to shore.

After the boat tour we drove back home (it’s still weird thinking of Amsterdam as ‘home’) and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon. It was the first time we didn’t have anything scheduled to do, so Conny and I went out to dinner with a couple other students in Leidseplein. I had chicken satay with a side of french fries that I dutifully ate with mayonnaise, and then felt very pleased with myself for having had three must-try Dutch dishes in the span of a single day. Conny went out to explore the Leidseplein nightlife, but a couple of other students and I decided to head back home. There’s a big, old-fashioned windmill around the corner from where we live, and we stopped for warm drinks at the café underneath of it, chatting until we were all tired and ready for bed. It was a very pleasant way to spend my first Saturday in the city, and I slept well that night for the first time since I arrived in Amsterdam.