Weekend Excursions Part I
a.k.a. God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands
The Dutch especially made the province of Flevoland. Here is a map of where it is:
See that water to the west of it? Yeah, Flevoland used to be part of that water -- as in, underwater -- until the Dutch did their dike and polder thing and turned it into land only about forty years ago. Now 370,000 people live where just a short time ago there was a sea. Sweet? Yes.
We had to go see a few features of this awesome land for ourselves, so our group set out in two vans yesterday morning. We had some initial plans that may have involved going to a wind turbine, but some extreme traffic situations caused us to bypass that and head straight to our second appointment of the day. The traffic allowed me to take some pictures of Dutch landscapes to pass the time:
The traffic also lead to a few sad moments when runners began passing our van at an astonishing rate, although one runner entertained us with his cyclical arm motions. But mostly, for over an hour, the view looked like some version of this:
It was all worth it, though, when we finally made it to our destination and got out to stretch our legs. Plus, the building had a coffee machine.
Our destination was the Balgstuw Ramspol, or bladder dam in the area called Ramspol. Prof. Aay told us that balg = bladder and stuw = dam, which led some of us to ponder the instance that we would ever need to use the Dutch word for bladder...
Anyway, the dam is used to protect the area behind it during storms by stopping the flood waters, but not during times of normal water levels when shipping traffic has to come and go normally. How does it work? (Hint: this is where the bladder feature comes in).
Here is the dam as we saw it yesterday, turned "off:"
And here's a picture of the dam being used to stop water in a storm:
See? There are underwater rubber pontoons that fill with a mixture of air and water in time of need and work to stop the rising waters. Pretty smart, right? Obama thought so:
I'm telling you, the Dutch are smart.
From there, it was off to a museum to learn about how Flevoland was designed and created. Here it is, the Nieuweland Museum:
It was a good museum. The best parts were the dubbed "historical" video about Cornelius Lely, the man who planned it all, and the 15 minute talk by a museum employee that summarized everything we've learned about in STNL class so far in a much more succinct format than six weeks of class.
The saddest part of the museum was that it was located next to these:
Outlet malls! And I had no time to shop at them. I guess that just means I will have to return to Batavia Stad someday in the future!
On a final note, here is a picture of what we saw EVERYWHERE in Flevoland:
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. We've seen them before when driving around the Netherlands, but never this many. Very cool.
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