Class Excursion! Piles of mud! Archimedes!

March 5th and 6th, 2011

Class Excursion #1

Sadly, my time here does not solely consist of biking around at midnight without any idea of where I am - occasionally I also have class and other school related things. One of those school related things is class excursions on some of the weekends: the group of students from Calvin are led by our professor on educational(ish) trips around the netherlands. This excursion consisted of a 2-day driving tour around different cities, focusing mainly on different mud flats, terps, polders, and peat bogs (the interview in the previous post was about this trip).

photo above: mud flats. about as interesting as it gets.

For the uneducated masses: mud flats are long expanses of mud, terps are raised dirt mounds, and polders are areas of land that are encompassed by dikes.

Throughout the 2 days, we drove around Friesland (in the north of the Netherlands), looking at different examples of these dutch landscape features, occasionally punctuated by a windmill or two.

One of the more engaging parts of this excursion was that we got to check out a windmill museum, with a working windmill that was powering an Archimedean screw - essentially a method of pumping water upwards. Its pretty ingenious.

on the left: the windmills at the windmill museum.

one of the towns we visited.

Entirely unrelated song post:
The Police - Roxanne - (Marty Party/Love and Light Remixx) - Marty Party has a ridiculous name, and this remix is sweet. The Police - Roxanne - (Marty Party/Love and Light Remixx) by Love and Light