Netherlands Day 7 - My Cabbages!

We spent today with another amazing group of relatives. It turns out all my Netherlands relatives are super friendly and welcoming. Today was even more special because we went around to see how my Opa lived in Broek op Langedijk back when he was a farmer in the Netherlands. We found out that the Dutch were crazy and incredibly hard-working.
First, we walked around to see where various relatives used to live and to see how things have changed. Pretty much all the nice cobblestone roads that we walked on all day used to be water. Back in the 70s they started filling in a lot of the channels to make a more modern community. We walked down a road that was original to the city and you could touch houses on both sides.

After we got a feeling for how life was on land we went over to the Broeker Veiling which is an old auction house where Opa would sell his vegetables. To understand how this worked you need a map of the area (the blue is water, red is buildings, orange is the auction): 

Each of the little islands is a farm that was created by the farmers. The whole area was basically a big tidal marsh at one point but by digging trenches and using that dirt to form mounds they made dry (ish) land. That means that the islands could only be as wide as they could throw the dirt. In the pics below you can see how skinny the islands that they farmed were:

Once all the hard work of making the islands was finished they had it made: they could just sit back and farm. On islands. Tiny islands that needed to make enough food to live off of and to sell. With no machinery. It's nuts. They'd also bring cows to islands to graze and then have to row back over a few times a day to milk them. It's basically Venice if Venice was the most difficult to access bunch of farms ever. 

Anyway, back at the Broeker Veiling auction the boats would pull up with their wares and they'd Dutch auction them off. In Dutch auctions the price starts high and a big clock-looking thing spins the price lower until someone presses the button to buy it. (In the pic below a boat was in the water between the two rows of benches that the people could bid on).   

We then took a cruise on an old boat through all the channels. Some of the islands are still being farmed by volunteers from the town but most are either overgrown with trees with hundreds of cormorants nesting in them or connected into housing development. I'm not usually into historical farming stuff but this whole day was super interesting. 

We ended the day at a fully restored windmill that a family is living in. the family lives in the first two floors on the windmill but put up glass walls so that people can still see the inner workings of the mill. The mill was originally used to pump water out of the fields and over the dike, but that's not needed anymore. Below are the gears that connect the outside spinning blades to the inside Archemedes screw:

This was the last day we spent with Dutch relatives. They were all down-to-earth people with great senses of humor that made this trip absolutely amazing. They also grow giant cabbages!