[ June 2017 ] During the tour which took us to the cities of Zuid-Holland, we visited a miniature park called Madurodam which is in the suburbs of The Hague.
In this park, various models of places in the Netherlands are displayed, 25 times smaller than the reality.
This place was established in 1952 in order to raise funds to run a charity called The Dutch Students Sanatorium which helped the ill students keep studying while they were recovering from tuberculosis.
The initial fund to build this park was donated by the parents of a Jewish soldier, George Maduro, who died in Dachau concentration camp.
That is why it is called Madurodam.
The profit from Madurodam is still donated to Dutch children’s charities.
They completed significant renovation work in time for the 60th anniversary in 2012 and introduced some interactive attractions using new technologies.
By doing so, what previously were declining revenues increased.
I am not familiar with these kinds of miniature parks, so I cannot compare, but it was really well made.
I was not surprised at the buildings which were very realistic, but what I was impressed with was the details such as the parked cars and people relaxing at a cafe.
The only complaint I had was that there were too few miniature cyclists who, in reality, are a lot more numerous in the Netherlands.
In fact, in this short holiday, we felt threatened by the cyclists quite a few times.
Our last visit to Amsterdam 6 years ago, too, it was so bad that my husband said “I would have got knocked down by a bicycle, if we had stayed one more day”, but this time was even worse.
If tourists like us, who are not familiar with the place, stand in the bicycle lane without realising, the cyclists would run them over without any hesitation.
They would ring the bell, but they would never stop.
And some of them ignore the traffic lights, too, so they are worse than cars.
On top of that, while the bicycle lanes are wide, the pedestrian paths are generally narrower and often closed because of road works.
In the U.K., we hear of many incidents of cyclists run over by motorists, so cyclists are usually regarded as the victims. But here in the Netherlands, they are definitely the assailants.
So I wanted them to have created more ferocious cyclists in miniature in Madurodam, too.
By the way, walking around this park, we learned that there are many lovely and magnificent buildings in the Netherlands.
I could use the leaflet they gave us as a guide book for my future plans to visit this country.
