Enkhuizen & the Zuiderzee Museum

Growing up, I remember hearing of of Holland and the Zuiderzee, the huge bay that opened onto the North Sea. It came as a surprise to me a couple of years ago when I found out that there is no more Zuideerzee. It’s now the Ijsselmeer(pronounced eye-sul-mer) or Lake Yssel! In fact, the Zuiderzee went away in 1932—17 years before I was born—when the Dutch built a 20-mile-long dike known as the Afsluitdijk or “closure dike” so that the Zuiderzee was no longer connected to the North Sea.

The resulting lake has a surface area of 420 square miles. The lake would be larger, but after building the dike, the Dutch reclaimed 548 square miles of land from the former bay and established the province of Flevoland. So what was once a great salt water bay is now a freshwater lake and polder land that’s home to over 400,000 people.

So today we took a train to the town of Enkhuizen that sits on the western shore of what used to be the Zuiderzee. It’s home to the Zuiderzee Museum. The museum has taken buildings from all around what used to be the Zuiderzee and rebuilt them there in Enkhuizen so that there are old buildings much like one would have found in a Zuiderzee fishing village a century or more ago.

We got off the train in Enkhuizen and walked across the street to the tourist information office (VVV) and bought our tickets to the museum. We took a ferry from the dock behind the tourist information office to the East entrance of the museum. We spent a few hours walking through old buildings and seeing “living history” reenactors show how people lived in the area during the 18^th and 19^th centuries. 

Vicki:  There was a note on each of the buildings explaining their history.  On the houses there was the name of the person first known to own it and live in it.  Sometimes there were stories about that person from a neighbor.  Many times, the children lived on in the house maintaining the family business.

We did take a break for a lunchtime snack of strawberry cake before visiting the indoor portion of the museum where we saw more ships along with the traditional dress associated with each of the little towns that surrounded the Zuiderzee.

We caught the 2 o’clock train back to Amsterdam and walked back to our B&B to rest a little before our final adventure of the day, a cheese tasting. We signed up earlier in the week for a tasting at ReypenaerCheese Shop a few blocks from our hotel. The tasting costs € 15 per person and sounded like fun. We’d tried to get in on Tuesday, but all the tastings were full.

Reypenaer is an old cheese maker here. Their original ageing warehouse is in Woerden, and the only temperature control it has is opening and closing windows. This warehouse holds 17,000 wheels of cheese, and they’ve built a new one that holds 100,000 wheels. They wanted to duplicate the “natural” aging as much as they could, so they monitor the temperature and humidity in the old warehouse and have the climate control system in the new warehouse mimic the conditions in the old one. Incidentally, each of those wheels has to be wiped down (to remove “sweat” from the aging process) and turned over once a week. The wheels typically go from 13 kg to 10-11 kg in the aging process.

So we tasted 6 cheeses—2 goat and 4 cow. For each one, the recipe was the same, but the cheeses differed in how long they had been aged. The goat cheeses were aged for 4 and 10 months while the cow cheeses were aged for a 6 months, a year, two years, and 3 years. We were also given wines (white, red, and a port) as “appropriate” wines to pair with the cheeses. All in all, it was a fun experience, and we are now official cheese “tasting masters.” If you don’t believe it, we can show you our certificates.

After cheese tasting, we walked from Reypenaer to Rembrandt Square where we ate outside at an Italian restaurant. It’s Friday night, and lots of people are out enjoying the cool, sunny weather.

Vicki:  Let me just repeat the above.  There are LOTS of people out.  George keeps reminding me that we are in an area with a large population density.  LOTS of people . . .

So we’re back at our B&B (with a stop for gelato on the way home), getting ready to kick back and read a little. Step count for today was 17,366!

Vicki:  George didn’t mention the BREXIT vote.  I think it’s interesting that I’ve overheard people talking about it today.  Okay, so I’ve heard “Dutch, Dutch, Dutch, BREXIT, Dutch, Dutch, Dutch.  The gentleman who took our tickets on the ferry today asked if we were from the UK since we spoke English.  He was very surprised about the way the vote went and didn’t like the outcome.  We were surprised as well.  However, there has been a lot in our own elections that have surprised me.