Kinderdijk Molens

A little while ago I posted about the University sponsored trip on the Pancake Boat to Kinderdijk.  Well, after a longish lull, this is the Kinderdijk section of that trip.  Kinderdijk is an area where there are still loads of windmills.  People still live inside them and they still sometimes use them to help regulate the water levels.

The name apparently comes from a story about how, after a big storm or after some flooding, or something like that, some folks came along and saw a cat sitting in a cradle that had wedged up on the dike.  Assuming that they would find something sad, they went and got the cradle and found a live little baby inside and figured that the cat had kept the cradle from capsizing and had kept the baby safe (although I am going to go out on a limb here  and say that that was from purely self-interest and not out of humanitarian motivations).

There was a storm coming in while we were there (fortunately, it didn't hit until about three seconds before I got to the metro station, so the whole trip was super windy, with really interesting clouds coming in, but still quite dry).

This was the first place that I actually saw any wooden shoes.   This is apparently a highly tourist-oriented area.

These are the large screws that regulate the water levels in the polder.  It is mostly run by electricity nowadays.

















I do not know why there is a little cut-out goat on top of this hay bale, but I thought it was pretty cute.

Do you notice the Holstein cow grazing in the field by the canal below?

We were supposed to get to go into one of the windmills to look around and see what it was like inside but the mill-owner wasn't there, so we just went wandering around, looking at the mills and checking out the canals.

While we were out walking around, I talked to a couple of girls who are on an exchange program from a university in Austria.  One was Austrian and the other was from Munich.  They were a lot of fun to talk to and both seemed very German.  Somehow, and I am sure that it will thrill some of you to hear this, we got onto the subject of German beverages.

I mentioned "Rrrradler."
The girl from Munich said "What?"
I said "Rrrrrrrrrradler!"
The girl from Munich looked very uncertain.
The girl from Austria said "She's saying "Rraddddlllerr.  I know, because I knew another American who said it that exact same way."
"Oh," said the girl from Munich, "yeah, rraddddlllerr."

I did, specifically, ask how "Radler" ought to be pronounced and what I was doing wrong.  They both said that it wasn't, in fact, an issue of how the "r" is rolled.  Rather, it is a question of how the "d" and the "l" get rolled together.  SO, even if I still can't order a Radler by myself, and even if other people can, it still isn't an issue of how well one rolls one's "r"s.

We had a fun time, though, talking about the superiority of German food over Dutch food and, especially, the terrible, relative, horribleness of Dutch bread and "bratwursts".