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TRAVEL JOURNAL PHOTOS Trip
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Windmills ahoy Today is my last day in Europe. Sadly, I fly home tomorrow from Amsterdam to Chicago. I spent today at the Netherlands' most famous landmark, the windmills at Kinderdijk. They are a farm of 18 windmills, bordering canals and farmland. I saw them in late afternoon, just as a warm sun was hitting them and reflecting off the water. I reached them by bus from Rotterdam--possibly the least attractive Dutch city to visit. It was the only city to be aerially bombed 50 years ago before the Dutch decided to surrender. I had heard that the replacement architecture was fairly creative, but it didn't live up to the hype. I did get to see apartments in the shape of cubes. The rest of the skyline was bland glass towers. Yesterday, I attended the Floriade, a once a decade Dutch flower expo. Simply put, it's a never-ending exhibit of flowers and landscape architecture. Though the day before that, I went to Zandvoort am Zee, literally "sand and sea." It's a huge beach 25 minutes from Amsterdam. Of all the countries where I've gone to the beach, including France and Italy on this trip, the Dutch are the least modest. At a bar along the beach, it's no shirt, no shoes, no top, no problem. In fact, I saw that only a thong would suffice. A little pot smoke also wafted by while I enjoyed some pannenkoeken with a British Columbia backpacker. During my first day in the Netherlands, I discovered that the Dutch took all their best art and hid it in the middle of a huge national park. In addition to browsing the best collection of Van Gogh's I've seen, I also took one of the free bikes available and rode on the bike trails that pass through forest and sand dunes. During my last couple days in Germany, I found some small German towns off the map. I discovered Andernach, a place with most of it's village wall intact. On their wall, I "marked my territory." I didn't mean to, but they had some bushes around it, and I, well, had to go. |
