European River Cruise 2017 Flashcards
Amsterdam:
Bikes everywhere. Unbelievable. Amsterdam has 890,000 bicycles!
Streets curbs and sidewalks have hundreds of bikes parked on them, and sidewalk and street medians are jam packed with bikes. Imagine a Target parking lot jam packed with bikes.
The bikes are old rag-tag type bicycles. Junk with wheels. You never see a nice shiny new bicycle. They get stolen for parts right away.
They ride their bikes to work, hauling kids, etc. Gasoline is about $6.00 a gallon. They sell it by the liter. Parking is about $1,000 per month downtown for work.
A typical house is $500,000, if you can find one to buy. Most houses and farms are passed down the family tree because land is scarce and water is plentiful. The city is 300 feet below sea level and the Dutch are experts at water management.
Apartments are houses rented or sold by floor. Most houses are narrow and tall. Some go for $500,000 per floor. And the house is not beautiful!
Most houses have an I-Beam built into the attic which extends outward for hoisting furniture. Some of the houses lean forward so the furniture does not bang against the house wall as they hoist the furniture up to the floor they belong on.
They are taxed on how wide the stairways are, so the stairways are very narrow and cannot be used to move furniture.
People live on house boats. Piece of junk house boats cost about $600,000! Nothing to do with the price of the houseboat, but everything to do with the parking spot on the canal. Here again, parking spots on the canal are passed down via the family tree. Very few are sold.
Amsterdam is a very expensive place to live. Most people move out of the city when they retire because they cannot afford to live there.
They have more canals than Venice. They also have regular patrols that fish dumped bicycles out of the canal. Normally they fish out 15,000 bicycles out of the canals each year.
Holland: There is no such place as Holland. It is just a generic word used to describe the Netherlands.
Windmills:
Windmills were invented to pump flooded areas. They pump the water out of the flooded areas and pour it into rivers taking it away from the houses and businesses. They still work manually in an emergency, but are electrically driven today. They use electric pumps today.
In the old days they would position the fan blade in a certain position to signal another windmill further down the road to pump or to halt pumping. This “smoke signal” type method was used for centuries for managing the pumping.
Families live inside the windmills and their job is to operate the pumps. These are called “Miller” families. Some families are quite large.
The wind mills pump water into other levels to later drain into rivers,//Cows have enormous udders when pregnant. Their last two months they must stay inside a special corral until delivery.
Visitors must wear protective blue shoe covers to protect from spreading any “mad cow” diseases. It also keeps your shoes clean as you walk on manure as you tour a cow and cheese farm.
Cows normally graze high in the Alps for 100 days to eat grass and flowers. Different flowers make different flavors in cheese.
The cows wear cow bells to help find them in the Alps. A large horn that looks like an overgrown saxaphone straighten out is blown in to call the cows back to the farmer for round up and travel out of the mountains.
Castle Day:
The castles along the river are leftovers from medieval times. Some are in ruins and some have people living in them, for instance, some are hotels.
The Castles are all perched high upon the hillside for viewing the river and to help protect the castle against attacks. Many castles have been attacked over and over.
The purpose of the castle is a sort of toll plaza for boats coming down the river. The castle would assess a tax, gathering food, clothing and other goods from the merchant. These were called Robber Barons.
The river was the only viable passage through this part of Germany. The trees and ground brush were much too thick to hack their way through for passage. This tax was how people made their living back then. The hillsides the castles were built into were actually foothills or smaller mountains. No snow on these foothills in the summer time.
Castle tolls were spaced about 6 kilometers apart. Today 200,000 ships use the Rhine river for shipping freight.
In the medieval days, there was no central government. Each klan was on their own. Many battles and sieges between them.
Top of Europe: Switzerland.
Top of Europe requires two separate train rides to the top. The first train is a normal train. The second train is a Cog rail, like a roller coaster to pull the train up and through the mountains. Back around 1890, they hired many Italians to chisel and blast these long tunnels straight through the mountains for the Cog rail train. It is almost unbelievable they did most of the tunnels right through the mountains with manual labor.
Before 1890, there was no first train and people had to hike up the mountains to reach the Cog train. Along the railway there are 70 waterfalls!
Before the rail roads were built, people were afraid of the Alps. They thought Demons and dragons lived up there. They even had priest go up there and Exorcise the demons!//After some of the Glaciers melted, many Roman artifacts were found in the mountains from when Rome governed the land in Switzerland.
It was dangerous up there. One couple went there to gather their cows and were never heard from again. //That is until the glacier partially melted. Finally their remains were uncovered and their desendents claimed the bodies. They had been frozen inside a glacier for 75 years! Time mag. had an excerpt on this in July 2017.
One particular glacier is still 900 meters thick. This is almost three Empire state buildings atop one another. About 1913 there were some wood carvers hired to build a tunnel inside this glacier. It is full of ice sculptures and tourists walk inside it today. The temperature inside is at Zero. This prevents the ice floor from being slippery. Every so often the ice sculptures need to be repaired because so so many tourist walking in the glacier tunnel generate enough body heat to partially melt the sculptures. //This glacier and the Alp trains pull in over 2 million tourist each year.
