Chocolate Village

Suffering from yet another bout of insomnia, I figured I would use my extra time tonight to fill you in on our latest biking adventure, which took place two weekends ago.

Prior to moving to Amsterdam, we had been told by a number of people that a visit to the quaint and typically Dutch village known as Zaanse Schans was a must. Not ones for visiting mainstream tourist attractions, we were skeptical about making the trip, especially given our aversion to being classified as "tourists" in our own home! However, the promise of seeing old working windmills, clog-making workshops, and locals dressed in Dutch costumes from years gone by, was almost enough to convince us to do it. The final compelling factor was the news that as we approached the village, and the whole time we were there, our senses would be overwhelmed by the unmistakable smell of chocolate. Enchanting smells of cocoa would cause us to leave all our troubles behind, giving us a delightful sense of joy and glee. Given our lack of interest in other legal Dutch substances promising the same effect, we went for the chocolate! Yet, forever the skeptics, we still convinced ourselves that even if we felt like sheep being herded around a fenced-in field, the exercise from the bike ride there and back would make the trip worthwhile, if nothing else.

After our day-trip was all said and done, we summarized Zaanse Schans with these few thoughts:

• We arrived as humans and left as sheep - just as we thought. We were two of what seemed to be a million tourists crammed into narrow paths and forced to blindly follow those in front of us as we travelled from building to building. These photos do not do the crowds any justice...


• It's true...the village did smell of chocolate. However, one would think finding some chocolate to try or buy would be easy in a place like this. Not the case. We could not find one vendor selling chocolate in the entire village and left empty handed.


• Only in a place like this could they get away with charging 10.00 Euros ($16.00) for a simple ham and cheese pancake.


• Yes, it is possible to see one too many windmills in the span of two hours.

The town of Edam is next on the plans for a weekend bike trip. We're going with the assumption that cheese does NOT have the same "tourist-attracting" effects as chocolate, because dang it, we're not tourists!