Ah, the wierden

Saturday was our first group excursion for our "Toward Environmental Sustainability..." class, hereafter referred to as STNL, which is what we all call it. I think that actually refers to STudy in the NetherLands, but, hey, S-T-N-L is a lot shorter than...whatever. Anyway, back to the topic.

I was fairly excited to travel across the Afsluitdijk, the long bridge-on-a-dike conglomeration that connects Noord-Holland to Friesland and turned the Zuiderzee (South Sea) into a lake called the IJsselmeer that is now fresh-water and separate from the North Sea. Look how geographical I just got there! I guess I am learning something after all!

Also, the Amazing Race teams stopped on the Afsluitdijk last season. My real reason for wanting to go there is revealed.

We stopped there for about 15 minutes on our way to Groningen. Here are some pictures. Obama also made his first ventures out into the Netherlandic world!
Notice the water on both sides.




















































And that's where the pictures stop. Sorry, people, but like time and tide, getting sick waits for no man. I thought the timing of the whole thing was pretty bad --seriously, I haven't been sick like that since FOURTH GRADE-- but, thankfully, coming back to your room and getting 20 hours of sleep does a world of good. This is also the reason why I have no pictures of Sunday's excursion. Which was, in part, looking at the inner workings of a windmill, too. Sigh. Oh well, it's over, it's done, I'm better, moving on.

For those of you who care to know, I will explain the meaning of the word "wierden" in the title. This is what Saturday's excursion centered on, and what we traveled 2.5 hours to Groningen to see. Imagine yourself as a Dutch person living in 600 BC or so. What would you do to save yourself from flooding? No, building dikes hasn't been invented yet. Think about it...

























If you said build mounds out of dirt and dung to elevate yourself slightly above the floodwaters, you've won! And that's what wierden, a.k.a. terpen, are -- dwelling mounds. We went to a museum about them, the rest of the group walked around outside to see some of them, and we traveled to 20 or so more by van.

I was sharing all this information with people in History today, and one guy (from Amsterdam) offered this statement: "Wierden! I know what those are! I've never seen one."

I don't know if that makes me happy or sad.