Zuiderzee Museum - May 8

We took a train one hour north of Amsterdam to see the beautiful Dutch countryside.  Enkhuizen has a lovely open-air folk museum with preserved historic buildings manned by people who do a convincing job of role-playing the old villagers.  They were smoking herring, which many of the tourists were eating - a bargain at 2 euros each!  We opted for a Dutch hamburger... 

We learned about The Zuiderzee, a wild bit of water, that was diked off from the Atlantic in 1932. Some of the sea bottom has been reclaimed; the rest is now a large freshwater lake called the Ijsselmeer   The Zuiderzee Museum preserves the culture of the people who once made a living on the Zuidersee.

We were partly inspired to choose this  trip for our third and final day in the Netherlands by the song, The Dutchman, that was sung by Jerry Jeff Walker (one of our favorite Texas singers) - see below for the lyrics.




The Dutchman 

A Dutchman at the Museum

written in 1968 by Michael Peter Smith* 

The Dutchman's not the kind of man
To keep his thumb jammed in the dam
That holds his dreams in
But that's a secret only Margaret knows
When Amsterdam is golden in the morning
Margaret brings him breakfast
She believes him
He thinks the tulips bloom beneath the snow
He's mad as he can be but Margaret only sees that sometimes
Sometimes she sees her unborn children in his eyes 

Let us go to the banks of the ocean
Where the walls rise above the Zuider Zee
Long ago I used to be a young man
And dear Margaret remembers that for me

The Dutchman still wears wooden shoes
His cap and coat are patched with love
That Margaret sewed in
Sometimes he thinks he's still in Rotterdam
He watches tugboats down canals
And calls out to them when he thinks he knows the captain
'Til Margaret comes to take him home again
Through unforgiving streets that trip him
Though she holds his arm
Sometimes he thinks that he's alone and calls her name
 
Let us go to the banks of the ocean
Where the walls rise above the Zuider Zee
Long ago I used to be a young man
And dear Margaret remembers that for me

The Dutchman still wears wooden shoes
His cap and coat are patched with love
That Margaret sewed in
Sometimes he thinks he's still in Rotterdam
He watches tugboats down canals
And calls out to them when he thinks he knows the captain
'Til Margaret comes to take him home again
Through unforgiving streets that trip him
Though she holds his arm
Sometimes he thinks that he's alone and calls her name


The writer of the song, Smith, had never visited the Netherlands!  But it is a haunting love song.


We enjoyed seeing some gorgeous sailboats on a beautiful sunny day.  For more pictures, click on Photos