Little Zaanse Schans
Some Holland pancakes in the morning to give us energy. Money sucker! Each plate cost 6.95 Euros! Madness! Poor Asian exchange students had 2 plates to share among 3.
The first Albert Heijn from 1887! (its like the first Cold Storage in Singapore or the first Hua Ho in Brunei). Little grocer has been turned into a (free!) museum.
Look how cheap things were then! Rent for 1.50 Gilders per week! Why can't things be as cheap now?!
One of the Dutch icons: wooden clogs! They were less glamourous then, equivalent to yellow rubber boots in Asia. But they've evolved and come a long way!
Wedding (or proposal) clogs. The groom had to carve these intricate details onto the clogs for his future wife! Now modern men, can you DO that? Consider yourselves lucky to only have to buy a ring.
Pointy tips were in fashion then too! Haha.
And clogs now.
And finally, our reason for going there.
We visited a windmill that produced oil from crushing peanuts. The windmill itself is rather small. Its all business inside with all the gears and mechanisms. Rather dark and smoky too. Downstairs was where most of the work was done while upstairs is just platform probably just for checking the gears and parts and leads to the 'balcony'.
Upstairs (the whole of it is like that):
From the 'balcony' (the windmill was so huge that I couldn't take a full picture of it):
Downstairs:
Raw materials:
On the left- Dried peanut skin (do not touch!)
On the right- Raw peanut nut (do not eat!)
Outside the windmill
Old Mac Donald had a farm, ee-ai-ee-ai-oh!
Cheese farm museum
Duie!
