Netherlandic Day Tour

After hearing our host parents rave about the Netherlandic sights - you have to love nationalism - we convinced them to show us a few of these sights. So today, Dustin and I headed out with Freddy and Gerda, our host parents, to witness the Netherlands in all of its glory.

First we went to this small town, the name of which I frankly don't remember. It's one of a few towns in the Netherlands that has canals between houses; a similar town is nicknamed "Little Venice." The town was pretty cool, but there's not much to say about it. Basically we walked on a path by the canal and saw the houses on the canal.

Then we went to some place called Old Emmesfort. Once there was a little 600 citizen harbor town located on a little island in the middle of the sea. At some point during this fine town's history, the Dutch people decided they wanted to drain the sea to create farmland, so they did their thing involving dikes and windmills and voila, land appeared. Now, the island is just a raised piece of land surrounded by farmland, and let me tell you, that makes the harbor pretty useless. So now there a hill with some places to tie boats, some ice-breakers and a water wall, and even a small foghorn building, all basically in the middle of farmland with no water within 50 kilometers (no, I won't calculate miles for you, deal with it). It was really an incredible sight. It also reminded me of a saying that I'd like to share with you - I read it on the internet while learning about the Dutch culture - here it is: God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.

After the island in the fields, we traveled to a small fishing town called Urk. Quaint and bitterly cold. That's probably the best way to describe it. It fit my mental representation of what I think of when I read about small harbor towns in pirate books: a small town with nice buildings, not much activity, and cold wind coming off of the water. The damp, foggy weather definitely added to the image. Once again, I thought this place was really cool; the buildings were what I've come to expect from a Dutch town: small, brick, close together, and ornate. There was great prototypical, red and white, three story light-house that one would expect to see in a town like this. We eventually found a fish shop and ordered some "Kibbeling," I'm not really the biggest fan of fish and I thought this stuff was really good, so, um, it must have been really good. By the way, how can you not order fish in a fishing town? It would be like not ordering a Gyro at Nick's Gyros or not having waffles when you're in Belgium; it's just something you have to do, whether you like fish or not - you need to give it a shot if the town exists solely to produce that food.

Filled up on Kibbeling, we headed to Bataviastad. I'm pretty sure the main reason this town existed was the outlet stores, but we went on the pretense of seeing some famous boat called Batavia. We hit up the outlet stores first, and I couldn't resist the urge to splurge on some sweet Puma kicks, but that's beside the point. After the outlet store, we did end up going to the ship; we looked at it from a nearby dock. It basically looked like your common pirate ship - I think that because all boats of that time look like pirate ships to me, in what other context have I seen old ships? The story on why the ship was famous never came out, so I decided that either it was the greatest pirate ship ever (short of Blackbeard's ship, but we all know he's just a fabrication) or the Batavia single handedly defeated the world's most famous fleet, the Spanish Armada, and ruled the Atlantic waters until a German submarine attacked it while it incidentally was carrying United States citizens, causing the United States to react against the Germans, and well, we all know what happened after that. Even if neither of those stories turn out to be true, I liked the boat.

Back to Hattem we headed, that was the end of our day tour.