Madurodam - Holland in miniature

Oana and Adriana (two of my former bosses in AIESEC Romania :) ) visited me in Rotterdam. We said that we go out for a breakfast, but we ended up in Den Haag in Madurodam.

Madurodam is a small city where you can find in miniature all the cool things from Holland. You can see the canal houses of Amsterdam, the Alkmaar cheese market and parts of the Delta Works, all replicated in minute detail on a 1:25 scale. All is set in beautiful gardens.

The plants in the miniature garden are kept in proportion by pruning. There are some trees that would grow to 20 or 30 meters high if they were not pruned. In Madurodam they grow to a maximum of 80 centimetres, even after years, and still look completely mature, with their trunks 'to scale'. These trees are pruned about six to ten times a year. The miniature garden accommodates several varieties of trees such as maple, beech, elm and oak and in spite of their diminished height they all look completely natural. You can visit the Madurodam website if you click here.

If you are in Holland, you should definitely visit it. I was thinking that it is a really cool marketing tool. You go there and you see in one place how Holland is, and therefore you really want to see all those great places in their normal size. It gives you a very good overview of how the country functions and what defines it as a country. Besides that, the place itself is a very cool tourist attraction. I was thinking that it would be great to have something like this in Romania. Anyway for the romanian tourism I think the first step should be the development of a centralized online booking system for the hotels and motels :) Or at least some normal websites for them :)