Monica's visit, The Netherlands II

Monica and I went to Zaanse Schans. According to Monica’s research, people in this village are wearing traditional Dutch clothes.

The view was great because of the wind mills, but we did not see any local people in traditional clothes, but the workers in souvenir shops. We gave this village a new name, Epcot from Disney World. It looked all fake.

However, once we started walking into the town, we were a bit surprised. Those windmill houses are actually used by local people. I thought they were for display to attract tourists, just like Epcot. But this town is actually functioning like any living places. That means, some stranger tourists come by in this town and take pictures of themselves having “actual someone’s” houses in the background. It sounds like big bother for the house owners

The next destination was Marken. This place is about fifteen minute away from Amsterdam by car. The drive to this Merken Island is beautiful. There is this long road running to the island, so we had beautiful water view on our both sides. The water was shiny, and we were enjoying the nice breeze with windows open! Beautiful!

Merken is also known as the town that carries the traditional cultures, like people are wearing traditional clothes in their every day life. We didn’t see local people outside in this town much to begin with, but the man I saw was wearing suspenders. Does it count? Monica and I stopped by at this small souvenir shop, and there she was; an old lady in “the” clothes sitting on a chair behind the casher knitting. She was very quiet and looked very cute. She was wearing red-white stripes shirt with a vest and a long skirt and a white hat. She looked like she would appear in a children’s book. I was very pleased to meet (see) her finally. This town is not Epcot!

Monica and I didn’t have breakfast, so we were pretty hungry. We walked and walked looking for a restaurant. But this town seems very small that there are not so many restaurants or café’s. It almost looked like everyone in this town know each other that they don’t need a restaurant to go out to, but rather go to the best cook neighbor’s house to have dinner.

Because we didn’t find any place for food or didn’t see local people outside, we were about to turn back to the car to drive back to Amsterdam…

Then all the sudden, this street showed up by the small port. From no choice to too many choices! Oh, you don’t know how much we appreciated this view! It seems like we were walking towards opposite direction. We had lunch here sitting outside and then went back to Amsterdam.

Monica’s stay was only for one week, but I really enjoyed her stay as well as the sightseeing!