Cheese, chocolate, and windmills!

February 19- Today a large group of Calvin students and other international students went to a place called Zaanse Schans, a small town nearby Amsterdam which had several windmills.  The weather was quite cold so we tried to spend as much time inside as possible.  We took a tour of the village and first saw how wooden shoes are made using the machines pictured below.

The rough build of a shoe is made in only 5 minutes.  The next place we saw was a replica of the first Albert Heijn in the Netherlands.  Albert Heijn is a large grocery chain in the Netherlands, similar to Meijer only a third of the size.  But this store was very small and had a very wide selection of coffee along with just the bare essentials.  Next we toured an actual windmill.  The inside of the windmill was very cool.  There were two massive 2000 kg blocks which were spinning as the windmill was also spinning from the wind.  

These large blocks were rolling over what looked to be flour and turned it into powder.  We also climbed to the very top of the windmill and could walk outside.  The way windmills are made is very impressive.  There are so many huge parts and gears all moving due to the wind.  

Next we were shown how cheese is made.  We also were able to try about 12 different types of cheese, some of which included goat cheese, a green cheese called Pesto, smoked cheese, and other types of older and younger cheese.  

The process of making cheese takes a very long time and also depends on whether the cheese is young or old.  We also got some free samples of chocolate.  This was my favorite part of the tour, tasting different types of cheese and chocolate all for free!  After the tour we had some free time before the next bus arrived so a bunch of us decided to look at the museum there, since it was free for us anyways.  The museum was really cool actually.  There were a lot of hands on objects, whether we were supposed to touch them or not is still unknown.  The museum seemed to be a large collection of random objects.  The museum had quite a few models of ships and random gardening tools hanging from the ceiling.  There was also a chocolate factory in the next building.  We learned the process of how to make chocolate while also playing games.  I felt like a kid in a chocolate factory.