I had intended to spend most of the day in southwestern Friesland Province but ended up getting there mid-afternoon because I spent so much time in the tulip fields on the Noordost Polder in Flevoland. Friesland Province is the home of the Frisian ethnic group, who have a language different enough from Dutch to be considered a separate language rather than just a dialect. Supposedly it's the closest language to English, but I don’t see any similarities; to me it just sounds like an incomprehensible version of Nederlands. Nowadays the Dutch are considered the tallest nationality in Europe, but the Frisians are the tallest people in the country and considered the tallest on average in Europe. They also have particularly Scandinavian features and often surnames that end in –stra, -ma, and –ga that are quite different from other people in the country.

Friesland is quite large to cover in one day, let alone part of a day and my intent was only to visit some of the small towns in the southwestern part of the province, many part of "The Eleven Towns", the towns visited by the long-distance ice speed skating race held only in winters when it’s cold enough for the canals to freeze . Nowadays that doesn’t happen very often, unlike in the past when the tradition started. If you look at Dutch paintings of the Golden Age of the 1600s, skating on frozen canals in winter is a common theme. But that was a chillier era. Even in modern times, though, most top Dutch speed skaters come from Friesland.

And wet and waterlogged Friesland is – much of the province is below mean sea level so there’s an extensive system of lakes and canals used for drainage. Of course, when you’re below sea level, it’s not just a matter of draining it out but pumping it up and out. Water levels are closely monitored and several major seaside pumping stations pump the excess that accumulates in stormy weather into the North Sea and Ijsselmeer. One of those is the Ir. D.F. Woudagemaal Pumping Station near Lemmer, the world’s largest steam-operated pumping station still in use. Built in the 1920s, it now only supplements other more modern electric pumping stations with lower operating costs at times of highest need, but is considered unique enough and significant enough in engineering terms to have been granted UNESCO World Heritage site status . I make it a point to try to visit such sites when I can if they seem interesting, and I personally find such industrial heritage to be. Apparently it’s not something of interest for the masses, though. There were only four other people on my English language tour, and the last tour in Dutch was half an hour earlier. It is a quite interesting site.

By the time I got to the small towns of Friesland the sky was gray and light getting low, so I limited myself to only two of the towns that are considered especially quaint and attractive – Sloten and Hindeloopen, the latter one being highly recommended by my roommate two nights earlier in Apeldoorn. Compared to densely populated Holland and Utrecht provinces, Friesland looks positively Ruritanian with braod expanses of completely flat fields filled with grazing cows and sheep, much smaller towns and villages, and less of the modern buildings so prevalent elsewhere in the Netherlands. Sloten is positively medieval, a village that mostly dates from the era before the so-called Golden Age. Seaside Hindeloopen beside the Ijsselmeer is equally quaint but more similar architecturally to Dutch towns on the other side of the old Zuider Zee.

Friesland province is a place that definitely warrants a further visit sometime in the future, a place of unique local culture and historical appeal. I plan to put it on my list of future destinations, perhaps for summer when the weather is warmer and the islands in the North Sea would be appealing.