Architect Abroad

Our adventures took us over to Holland, as many of you know Mike’s Father was Dutch and had 7 brothers and sisters, a few of whom remained in Holland and had families of their own. So Mike, Laura, and I got to spend some time with the Dutch cousins. Mike and Laura are also Dutch citizens, but alas I am not. I thought I would check if Holland needed another architect, but Rem Koolhaus mentioned that they already had it covered. Speaking of architecture, Rotterdam is home to some of the most interesting modern architectural experiments in Europe. The city was bombed extensively in WWII and out of those ashes arose some really great projects, such as the cube houses and the market hall.

In fact Rotterdam was my favourite of the Dutch cities that we toured to, which included Amsterdam, Utrecht, and the Hague. There is just something fun and quirky about the city that feels accessible and familiar and maybe slightly North American as the majority of buildings here are from the 60’s to now. For the quirky factor, Rotterdam has surfing in one of it’s canal’s downtown, what an amazing idea.

After leaving Rotterdam, we hopped over to Amsterdam, which I haven’t been to since I was in my late 20’s. Going back as a parent was a totally different situation as I was looking for ideas on places to go that didn’t include partying. So we hopped into a canal boat in Amsterdam,

fell in love all over again at the Van Gogh Museum

The food in Holland deserves lots of comments as we were really busy downing Dutch Droppe candy which is a mix of salt and black licorice, as a PSA don’t try this unless you have been raised on it, which Laura was. In fact the candy game in Holland is so extraordinary that there is something for everyone here, the young and old will definitely be partaking.

Naturally we had to try some homemade Stroop Waffels, and then there is those chocolate sprinkles on toast that our family made sure that Laura had, and let’s not forget the ubiquitous amounts of Nutella that is pretty much all over Western Europe. Lastly was the Pickled Herring (this one deserves a PSA too), but frankly we eat and like most things and the world is full of new flavours.

All in all it was hard to say goodbye to Holland, but as Laura is a citizen, maybe she’ll decide she wants to come back here to attend university. It might end up being less expensive that uni in our city actually.

Our last activity in Holland was to check out the old Windmills at Kinderdyke. This is a UNESCO Heritage site and these mills date back to 1700’s. As many of you may know, the Netherlands is a country where 1/3 of it is under sea level and is the most densely populated area in Europe. Over 18 million people live in an area smaller than Newfoundland. So, have they thrived over the years, well they used the windmills to manage water within the lands, pumped out water to create more land, used dykes to control sea water from infiltrating the low lands, and have created the most impressive engineering of water management systems, arguably since the Romans.

These mills are just a backup system now as more modern water management systems have come to bear, but there are still millers that work and live at these historic mills. From the distance they appear to move so gently, but when you are up close with them, those blades would tear you apart if you were to get near them. There is so much more that I could say about Holland, but the best parts of it was spending time with family.