Holland..

Our next outing was to Holland.. Netherlands.. I can never forget this , because from my younger ages I wanted to go here.
Its a very small place in Europe , near Belgium and it just takes one day to go and come back from Brussels.
We have the international train service from Nord station or from Brussels Central.

We were about to miss our train , because of the ticket counter not being opened , but we ran and caught the train and got the tickets in the train which is a lot of money more and till now we have not got the refund amount. This was on 4th of April.
Our first place in Holland was Zaanse Schaams, the wind mill place.We need to get down at Amsterdam Central and go to Koog Zaandijk by train and from that station we need to just walk by looking at the small green signs which point to it. There is a small boat , which takes everyone over to the wind mill place(Zaanse Schaams) past the bridge.
Its just a ten minute ride and then you need to walk for another ten minute , there will be signs , hence we need not worry.
Then , you reach the WIND MILLS place. These are all very old wind mills started about 1600's , people were so intelligent at that time , that they used the logic of the wind mill to do great jobs.
There were about 100 wind mills , but this area contains only 6 or 7 now.
Not all the wind mills are open daily, but when we went there were 3 open.
We just hopped into one which was basically making dyeing powder from huge coloured rocks.
The entrance is 3 euro and you can walk upto 3 floors and go to the top and have an excellent view. The stairs are so narrow but very secured and you need to be careful that you dont hit yourself.

There are huge wodden blocks which go and break the coloured rocks into powder and can be used as dyeing agents. The wodden blocks have another wodden block which rotates and hits to form the coloured powder.

The view is excellent from above and you can see the four shafts turning according to the wind.
A couple of photos in front of the wind mill and it makes the day!!

We then headed back to the cheese factory there , I have not seen cheese cakes so big any where and yes the place smells :(( . The entry is free for this. They have lots of chickens which breed there .
Then we visited the wooden shoe work shop , wow it has awesome wooden shoes , in different shapes and varieties and yes they are heavy. There is a person who teaches you how to make wooden shoes and its for 1 euro.

Then we headed out and walked back and used the ship and walked again to the Koog Zaandijk station and off we went to Amsterdam central.

We had plans of meeting my friend Dhanu in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is a beautiful place , its very lively as far as i saw and the weather is mostly chill.
We headed straight to the Dam square and wow , it was like a fare . They had giant wheels and lot of small games and video games .

We walked along the same fare and we saw the Royal palace of Amsterdam . I had marked it as one of my tourist spots , but i never knew the old building there was the palace. It was just a laugh for us!!

Then we walked the streets back to the Red light District of Amsterdam , which is formed 3 to 4 streets and you can just have a walk there.

We then came out to the dam square and at last met my friend and then had a big walk. It is awesome to walk on the streets , but you must need energy and constant food.

We headed to the Torcher museum . Amsterdam is a place full of museums and has lots of museums , you name it and its there. The Torcher museum is a famous one and it depicts all the different kind of punishments which were followed in previous times and the respective instruments used for the same.

It has the famous electric chair , it has a nailed seat , has iron rings and lots of that stuff.

After the museum , we just walked to the Historic museum and had a look from outside , then we headed to the famous Anne Frank House.

It is said that Anne Frank during World Wat 2, with her children hid in this place and wrote her diary , which was published later.

We did all this walking with the help of a map.

The queue is always big ,hence we just saw it from outside and headed back to the Amsterdam Central station and back to Brussels.