A Trip to the ‘Zuiderzee’-city Enkhuizen

The trip is actually organized as a staff excursion of my faculty. It’s an annual thing. Luckily I haven’t missed the opportunity of my first year here!

The destination of the excursion is the former ‘Zuiderzee’-city Enkhuizen. We got there by boat from the Frisian place Stavoren. In Enkhuizen we visited the Zuiderzeemuseum, where a special exihibition on the 75th anniversary of the closure of the ‘Zuiderzee’ by finishing the Afsluitdijk was on show.

The whole Zuiderzeemuseum consists of an open-air and an indoor museum.

The open-air museum displays a number of ‘neighborhoods’ laid out according to the historical street plan of various Zuiderzee villages. The structure of the museum villages and their surroundings are all to scale. Paving, property boundaries, sheeting and planting are an approximation of the historical situation. The history of everyday life around the Zuiderzee is told here in living color. Actors and craftsmen bring to life the small fishing villages that skirt the Zuiderzee. I even tasted some freshly smoked fish made in the fish smokehouse. It’s really good! I think the most special feature of this open-air museum is that, unlike many other museums of tourist attractions, this one shows the real thing. We also got to see the old-time fisherman’s house, butcher’s shop, cheese warehouse, pharmacy, schoolhouse, grocery store, bakery, etc. Among all, the pharmacy is most impressive for me. In the room behind the pharmacy there’re some forty ‘yawning heads’. The wide-open mouths of these highly original shop signs referred to the medicines on sale within.

The indoor museum is a bit boring. (Should’ve visited the indoor section first!) All I’ve figured out from those similar-looking paintings and pictures which address the process of the construction of Afsluitdijk is: it’s really a huge load of work, a lot more than you can imagine. It just took place 75 years ago, but everything was done by hand! Think about how fast machines have been developing in the past 20 years! Isn’t that amazing our life has been changing at a progressively increasing speed?

During the museum tour, I kept following Pieter and Arthur, two nice guys who had the patience to explain everything to us in English (poor me….can’t understand Dutch at all). Otherwise, I couldn’t get a full story of this beautiful place!

Really glad I made myself part of this trip. Thanks to H.F. who told me about the excursion. Too bad he was not able to make it. Wish him a good time in Prague.

P.S. Wanna learn more about the history of ‘Zuiderzee’?

        See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuiderzee.