Where are John and Kara?: Zaans Schans, North Holland, Netherlands

Kalverringdijk, Zaan Schans

Today, Holland is as multi cultural as bustling New York City or perhaps similar to the busloads of crowds under the Eiffel Tower during a warm summer's day.

Dutch women no longer walk around with white triangular head bonnets the long white tassels flapping over their shoulders but rather ripped jeans and colourful sneakers.

The men don't wear painted wooden clogs into the fields to herd animals but stylishly slick their hair back and ride into offices on rickety bikes. Today's holland is exciting, fun and well, pretty westernised.

Lagedijk homes, Zaandam

The store across from where we parked

But there's a place not far out of Amsterdam, really just a stone's throw away that offers a glimpse of the traditional Dutch way of life in the 17th and 18th centuries. Zaanse Schans is packed with wooden windmills, barns, houses and museums built in the typical Dutch wooden architectural style. The buildings in the area are all authentic and part of one big free-entry outdoor museum. Today being only somewhat overcast but pleasantly warm we decided it would be perfect to go have a stroll in the area and check out some windmills.

John among the windmills

Baby mills on a front yard

Waving in the wind

Zaanse Schans, Amsterdam's windmill capital is located in Zaandam within the surrounding Zaan River region, called the Zaanstreek (a lot of Zaan-ing going on here!).

Hitting the northward winds

Zaan being the name of the river and Schans a type of fortification built during the 1566-1648 Eighty Years' War of Dutch independence. However it was later, during the Dutch Golden Age that Zaandam served as a large milling centre.

Locals riding about Zaandam

A prime location away from Amsterdam centre but close enough that savvy business people could keep a good handle on what was going on. There were hundreds of windmills which powered saws that processed Scandinavian wood for the shipbuilding and paper industries.

So many in fact that Zaandam grew into Europe's centre of commercial ship building and incidentally played an important part in the worlds history of whaling.

But paper making and boat building aside, Zaandam was also home to several hundred more windmills which kept Dutch life afloat: performing a wide range of work, such as producing shelves, paint, mustard, flour, gin, oil and most importantly keeping the land flood free.

Zaandam was a relatively small area but together the thousand or so windmills formed the first industrial site in the world. Today however there is only a faint echo of what the Zaandam must have looked like before the Industrial Revolution; and even still we were excited to get our now twenty first century windmill on.

The wide river Zaans

We parked on the west side of Zaans River down a quiet, residential rustic-orange bricked road where small tuffs of green grass grew between the dirty bricks. The street was lined with shiny deep sea green coloured houses each one with a stunning unique facade which would have once been an indication of the families' status.

There was a small paragraph on the tourist website that we felt summed the area up quite nicely:

A feeling of nostalgia, no, more than that, a slight feeling of homesickness will strike you when you see the wooden facades, the slit windows and the low doors. Here, centuries of memories are like footprints of history resounding in each chamber. Hundreds of years ago, people slept, cooked, laughed, cried, loved, argued and were born and died within the walls.

Sure, this wasn't our direct heritage but there was something calming about looking at the intricately detailed homes and knowing someone carved them out by hand, with love, appreciation and hard work.

Houses in Zaans Schans village

The oldest house in Zaandam (1685)

We crossed over the wide and ever so slightly wavy Zaan river to explore de Zaanse Scahns windmills and already our eyes set on the slowly moving sails that dotted themselves down the river. Could we smell saw dust? No it was stroopwafels, and tourists. A huge hustle, bustle and glassy eyed mass of tourists. They were everywhere, catching us by surprise. Seemingly unfazed (thanks China for that) our first stop was the Albert Heijn Museum Shop (the birth place of one of Holland's biggest supermarket chains) but they didn't even sell water.

Look at me, I have a birthday hat

Unique doorway.. we like!

Catching some sun

Why yes, we will sample your cheese

Bridge into the village

We walked quietly around the old houses along the canals, through the fields and past several museums. We peeked into the glazed-over windows of the time museum and drooled over treats in the bakery museum and we waved at passers-by on their boat tours. We loved that there were farm animals and baby ducks happily going about their day in the water and across the canals, oblivious to the hoards of foreign guests.

They are making cheese here!

We explored the cheese museum, tasting samples of old Gouda and soft fresh herb varieties. We clambered through the very interesting and insightful wooden clog museum and watched a short film about how they make the shoes- wedding clogs anyone?

These shoes were made for clogging

One of these days these cloggs will
walk all over you

Some old style regional cloggs

Clogg making in progress

We walked past the old windmills listening carefully for their creaks and groans as parades of people climbed about inside their bellies and their wooden sails faced the northerly winds.