All Dutch apartment buildings have outrageously steep staircases that would never be legal in the U.S.. Note chair lift.
The Hague is on the seashore and is a summer beach destination
Subway stations with poster exhibit
Haarlem
The Dutch are famous for not believing in privacy and not using curtains. These are peoples’ houses where you see them sitting directly in front of your face as you walk by. Next photo shows close-up.
This and next photo show someone’s kitchen. It’s like this everywhere.
Train station
Train station
Convenience store in the train station
Public urinal
Frans Hals museum
Frans Hals museum
Pieter Saenredam
Dollhouse in Frans Hals museum
Dollhouse
Dollhouse
Teylers Museum, science museum where no exhibit has been updated or altered since the mid-1800s
Teylers Museum
Teylers Museum
Teylers Museum
Teylers Museum
Magic tricks from mid-19th century
19th-c. transoceanic telegraph cables
The highway in the middle of the sea
This is a 20-mile long dike that runs across a huge bay (technically not a sea but it feels like one because you can’t see any land when you’re there) with a road on it and a cafe smack in the middle which is surely one of the most peculiarly-sited restaurants on earth. The dike is called the Afsluitdijk (enclosure dike, pronounced ahf-slout-dike) and the bay is the IJsselmeer (ice-ell-mare). A dike is the same thing as a levee. They don’t have to run alongside a river, they can also go across a body of water, in which case they’re a type of dam. The j in IJsselmeer is capitalized because ij counts as one letter in Dutch (this has mystified me since childhoold so I finally looked it up.)
Maps showing how thousands of acres have been drained and converted to usable land over the last 2,000 years
Windmill near the Afsluitdijk
The whole point of windmills is to drive a a huge screw (“screw of Archimedes” named after the ancient Greek inventor) at the bottom that draws water from marshes or other waterlogged land and pushes it upwards into a canal or river, thereby drying out the lower land.
Interior looks like a Vermeer painting!
Thatched roof seen from inside
Rotterdam
Train station
Apartment building with a food hall underneath. Sadly the food is just okay but nothing special. Nothing you can’t get in any U.S. city nowadays. I’ve seen fresher, higher quality food in food halls in places like Milwaukee.
