“Zuiderzeemuseum is a mostly open air museum village set up to mimic the architecture and ‘atmosphere’ of village life around the Zuiderzee throughout history.” (Wikipedia)

You need a full day to explore this place (and we still didn’t see everything!). There’s lots to do here. I ended up with so many photos that I’ll have to break this up into two posts, I think.

The exterior of the indoor part of the Museum that we didn’t have time to see (supposed to be great!).

Side view of the building. See how it leans forward? You’ll see that a lot in Holland. Houses used to be taxed on the footprint of the building, so they built narrow buildings. The narrow staircases made it hard to move in furniture, so a hook is built into the top of the building so that furniture can be hoisted up (pulley) through the top window. The buildings have a slight forward lean so that the furniture, etc. doesn’t bump and drag along the facade of the building and get damaged.

you can learn how to make fish nets..

..and these wooden clog sail boats

Kids can dress up in old fashioned traditional Dutch clothing. Quinnie wanted to do this but we ran out of time. They also had a building where you could make your own scented soap, but we didn’t have time to do that either (those wooden boats take a long time to make!).

old fashioned bowling

and other games

you can also learn how to make rope

Kiera exploring and checking out drying fish skins

They had old stores and homes with reenactors. Cheese shop 🙂

basket weaving

wood shop

We stopped here to get some smoked herring and eel.

The girls LOVED it!

blackened wooden clog sail boat at the fish smoking place

Quinnie ate her fish on the grassy hill behind this windmill (you can see the fish smoking place in front of the windmill).

She went back for seconds!

view of the North Sea behind us (lots of sail boats!)

You can rent these row boats..

..or go “fishing”. This was surprisingly hard!

There was this awesome hill you could climb up and run down. At first I thought it was made up of gravel…

Nope! A huge hill of shells!

 

Quinnie choosing a few shells to bring home.

Last post on Zuiderzeemuseum and Enkhuisen coming up next…

 

“Zaanse Schans is a neighbourhood of Zaandam, near Zaandijk in the municipality of Zaanstad in the Netherlands.” That sentence from this village’s Wikipedia page cracks me up! Those locations sound made up- like they’re from a fairytale story or something.

Maybe that’s kind of fitting since the place looks like this…

so many windmills!

The girls studying the plants and insects- their favorite activity.

general store

The shop workers were dressed in traditional Dutch clothing. Wish I’d gotten better pics of them.

Dutch Stroopwafel

Gevulde Koeken (Dutch almond paste filled cookies)

the inside

crazy trashcan / Cannabis Energy Drink? Isn’t that an oxymoron?!

The bakery goods must not have filled them up because the girls kept eating this edible plant (Taubnessel) that was everywhere. Quinnie has learned a surprising amount about plants this year at school.

more Taubnessel- they can’t get enough!

Quinnie spotting the ducks. There were also some farm animals there. She even got to hold quite a few of the chickens (her favorite).

back at the parking lot..

..where they had these vintage spinning advertisements

Here’s more info on Zaanse Schans…