Day 8: Zaandem and Northern Amsterdam

Today was probably one of my favorite days here in Amsterdam, even with the rain. We took a train to Zaandem, a province in northern Holland. This was a city largely centered on industry. We visited the Zaans Museum, which had a lot of information on daily life, such as women’s clothing and an exhibition on Delft pottery. There was also an exhibition on wax production, and a chocolate factory! Verkade is a chocolate manufacturing company with its headquarters in Zaandem. Milling was an important occupation in this city, as evidenced by the many windmills still intact. Flour milling was the center of Verkade’s business: they eventually produced cookies, chocolate, and other sweets. The girls who worked the conveyor belts were known as Verkade girls. Their hands were more delicate and thus better suited for packaging fragile chocolates, and they asked for lower wages as well. There was a fun game that involved playing the role of a Verkade girl and packaging chocolates. You could even play with a partner! My friend Alan and I played the game, and we both did well.

I did better though. Hah!

After the museum and lunch, we walked through the Zaanse Schans, an open-air museum recreating life in a Dutch 17th century town. I got to see how the Holland wooden shoes are made and was able to sample some homemade cheese. And of course, there were many windmills.

Jan Donkers, famous Dutch personality, took us to north Amsterdam by ferry later that night. Unfortunately, there were a lot of things that we weren’t able to do. He was going to take us to a music performance, but the performance was cancelled due to the rain. Also, other roads were shut down because of a music festival that was going on there (a festival a lot of my friends tried to find earlier in the weekend but couldn’t). Nonetheless, we all had a good time and we even had a drink afterward.

There were some interesting things we learned about the place. North Amsterdam is an example of reclaimed land in the Netherlands: originally, the land ended at the shore where our ferry left. Northern Amsterdam is therefore entirely manmade. It is also probably one of the quietest places in the area, and many people originally didn’t think anything happened there because of this. When word of music performances come up, for example, people in other areas don’t believe that they are being held in northern Amsterdam.

Another very interesting fact is that this place used to be where the worst criminals were hanged. The government of the time didn’t want to expose the public to the hanging, so criminals of capital offense would be shipped off to the island so they could be punished for their actions. The only ones who were not hanged here were homosexuals: the people deemed this too high a crime for them to be “properly executed” on Dutch soil, so they were dumped into the sea to drown. Nowadays, it is used for a far less grisly purpose: many archives are placed here, making northern Amsterdam act as a kind of storage.

Today was a pretty chill last day in Amsterdam. I think that being able to explore within a town as they would have been in the 17th century was one of the best days to conclude our stay here, and just might have been one of my favorite parts of our stay here.