Cycling.

The Netherlands is well know for its cycling population. Many cyclists have cycled the whole way around the country. There are a number of reasons for this.

1) Holland has many cycle lanes through out the country. there is said to be 19,000 kilometers of cycle paths through the county side of the Netherlands.

2) because the county is so small, it is easy to cycle around the county without a problem. this makes it easy to see the whole of Holland.

3) IT'S FLAT! There are very few hills and mountains. this makes it very easy and enjoyable to get around.

4) The dutch are very good at speaking English. so there would be no problems communicating.

Polders and Dikes.

The Netherlands is a very small country and therefore needs all the land it can get so the Dutch came up with a ploder. A polder is man made or reclaimed land. Because Holland is a flat country and is more or less at sea level, it wasn't hard to drain out some of the sea to create more land. This created more land for the Dutch. Because the land is so flat and also is at sea level the polders are at high risk of flood, so they came up with a Dike. A Dike is like a dam, it keeps the water away from the reclaimed land and prevents the land being flooded.

Projects like this have also taken place in many other countries such as:
1) Belgium
2) Canada
3) France
4) Germany
5) Italy
6) Poland
7) united kingdom.

Although they were successful over half the polder land in Europe is in the Netherlands.
the dutch have influenced other countries as well. for example in New Orleans, after the floods that went on there, they built dikes up around the water fronts to try and prevent flooding happening again, but even though they have used the same idea as the dutch method, the chances of New Orleans being flooded again is 100 times greater than the chance of Rotterdam being flooded.

windmills in holland.

Windmills have been around for a long time. At one stage Holland was home to 9000 windmills. They were used as a source of electricity and also to grind grain. since then people have come up with new ways to provide people with these services. Quicker and cheaper ways to get the same result. This has had an impact in the windmills, now less that 1000 traditional windmills are left in the Netherlands. Most of thees are used for a purely scenic reason. It is said that windmills are of a Persian origin, and were slowly spread across Europe.

There are still a wide variety of windmills spreed across the whole of the Netherlands:

This is a Post Mill and is one of the Netherlands oldest windmills.

This is the Whip Mill, this was an upgrade of the Post mill. It worked faster and was easier to use.

This windmill is known as the meadow mill or aanberengertj, it brings water from the low lying parts in the ditches on the general level to the polder. They are found mostly in the province of Noord-Holland.

This is a very rare windmill as there are only four still standing in the Netherlands. It is called the Paltrok. They are Timber saw mills.

All images from: http://katspanje.tripod.com/windmills.html

video

below is a video of the rhine running through amsterdam.

enviroment.

Hundreds of clients want to use the ports of Rotterdam. therefore it has to be well organized. they spend weeks setting up timetables and rotas for all the companies that wish to import or export goods. this job is given to the harbour master.
another issue is with the environment. because there are so many ships passing through and each of these big ships produce tonnes of waste there have to be certain things in order too keep the environment as clean as possible. so to try and cancel out some of the waste that is released in to the air from every ship that passes through, the ports try to use as much naturally electricity as possible. they use windmills to try and power some of the electrics in the port. while they still use electricity, they are trying to use more and more natural sources so they can keep the ports and also the whole of Rotterdam environmentally friendly.

image from www.blauearth.wordpress.com

Rotterdam

rotterdam is located on the west coast of the netherlands. it is best known for the ports it has. they are the biggest ports in europe. "The port is the gateway to a European market of more than 500 million consumers. With an annual throughput of more than 400 million tonnes of goods, Rotterdam is by far the biggest seaport in Europe." This was a quote taken from http://www.portofrotterdam.com/


the port in rotterdam exports good to more than 1,000 ports in the world. the ports is 24 meters in depth, (75 feet) and it has no locks. this means the port is deep enough to hold some of the largest vessels in the world. this is why it is the most famous port as it is the only port in europ that can hold large ships and vessels. the ports has all sorts of facilities to provide companies with all they need to import and export their good.