Kinderdijk

The other day I went with a couple of friends to Kinderdijk. Kinderdijk is a small village near by Rotterdam, it is settled next to the Rhine river (at that spot is called Lek, actually the situation of the Rhine in The Netherlands is pretty complex, with lots of branches and names, you can read more about it in Wikipedia). The village is included in the area called "De Groene Hart", The Green Heart in English, that is the big area between Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam and Utrecht, it is mainly farms and fields, except some villages and the city of Gouda.

This area is full of paths to walk or ride the bike, as we went by car to Kinderdijk we walked a bit in the surrounding area. Just next to the parking lot there is a path that goes in between two canals and it's full of wind mills, one of the national symbols of the country. Nevertheless the wind mills have played a huge role in Dutch history as they were used to pump out water to avoid floodings in the constant war against water. I didn't know about this before coming to the country and I thought that they were just for grind seeds or things like that but a Dutch friend told me that and... actually makes a lot of sense, who is gonna crowd the country with wind mills just to grid seeds? Of course some of the mills are also for that, in Zaanse Schan (kind of a park with wind mills and little houses, probably I will talk about it in the future)  you can enter the wind mills and see how they were used to produce mustard or as sawmills.

So, there we went to walk a bit, make some pictures and expend a couple of hours just enjoying the lovely Dutch fall, with black -very black- clouds above us that threatened rain and wind that could move you to the canal in a second, just to oppose the blog's name :)