Musings from Mandy

I took the non stop flight from Logan to Amsterdam both ways and it is a huge plane so it takes forever to do anything.  This is the line to go through security which you do individually at the gate.  With your shoes on (unless you're me). Looks like the entrance to Anne Frank's House. I missed you so much!!! Mom picked me up and we went to Rino's in East Boston.  It had an hour wait at 2 on a Thursday.  It was phenomenal.  Oh chicken parm.  You are so delicious.

Most Dutch windmills have been replaced by a more modern mill.  At Zaanse Schans there were 10 that were still in good shape and fully operational and they are under protection in a national park kind of way.  Each one is full operational and makes something that a traditional mill would have been used for: timber, cheese, chalk, etc. Fellow Tour Member:  Wow, aren't these windmills just beautiful? Me:  Holy crap those chickens are huge!!

Marken is a little tiny village that is adorable because it's all painted the same.  Here I went to a wooden shoe shop / tourist trap.  They are actually more comfortable than you'd think.  These are expensive (like 50 euro / 75 US dollars) but you can also get a way more legit pair where they take impressions of your feet and then make the shoes to fit them.  They're popular today for gardening and field work since they are waterproof.

Today I decided to go full tourist and go on a guided tour.  There were three more places I wanted to see in the Netherlands, Volendam, Marken, and Zaanse Schans Windmills.  To get to Volendam you have to take a bus and then you need to take a ferry to Marken from there.  There also no train to Zaanse Schans so I figured it was easier rather than to try to take all the different buses to just do a tour.  I'm glad I did.  It was pretty impressive.  The initial greeting from the tour guide was in English, then Dutch, then Spanish, then French, then German, then Italian.  Once he got a better feel for his crowd he was able to drop the Dutch and Italian but kept up with the other four all day long. Volendam was once a prosperous fishing port but had a major flooding problem so they put in a dike and turned the port into a lake which solved the flooding problem but also eliminated fishing.  Today it's mainly a tourist attraction with lots of restaurant...