Day 10: Aalsmeer Flower Auction & Amsterdam

    We left Delft this morning and headed to Amsterdam, the last city on our tour.  Along the way, we stopped at the Aalsmeer Flower Auction.  Neither one of us had any idea how massive this thing is.

    There's no way to capture this on camera.  It's the largest flower auction in the world, taking place in the LARGEST BUILDING in the world (10.6 million square feet!)  And everywhere you look, flowers are quickly being sent on their way, by people on scooters flying around, pulling what are essentially trains of flowers.  It's amazing that they don't crash into each other.

    Flowers from all over the world are sent here to be auctioned, then shipped all over the planet.  About 20 MILLION flowers are sold every DAY.

    The auctions are done in rooms like this, with the buyers at computer terminals:

    It's a "Dutch" auction, which is the opposite of the way we do it:  The price starts really high, and they keep dropping it until someone pushes their button to buy.  It's a much faster system, and makes we wonder why everyone doesn't do it like that.

    The freshly-cut flowers are for sale the next morning, often on the other side of the world.  Amazing.

   Next, we stopped at The Muiderslot, a castle that was built in 1370.

    We took a tour, and had a group lunch in the basement.

    Then the tour bus pulled into Amsterdam.  The weather has not been cooperating with us for the past few days.  But even though it was raining, we took a walking tour of some of the neighborhoods.

    Then we had a group dinner, at an Indonesian restaurant called "Kantijil & De Tijger."  It was the best meal we've had so far!  An army of waiters brought out DOZENS of plates to each table, containing all sorts of beef, pork, chicken, fish, noodles, etc.  There were several variations of each of them, and everyone dug in, family style.  There was not enough room on the tables for everything.  But as soon as we finished one dish, they brought three more.

    I'm not sure if it's because of the several drinks we had, or the contact high from all of the pot smoke walking back...  but at the hotel, Nat and I flipped through the channels and couldn't stop watching one show-- featuring some sort of puppet, speaking Dutch.  We had no idea what he was saying.  And we kept trying to figure out what he was:

    A brick?  A waffle?  Every few seconds, he would appear in a new scene, often from a TV show or movie:

    Eventually, I found him on Wikipedia:

"Bernd das Brot is a depressed, grumpy, curmudgeonly, constantly bad tempered, surly, fatalistic, melancholic loaf of pullman bread, speaking in a deep, gloomy baritone.  His favorite activities include staring at his south wall at home.  His favorite expression is "Mist!", used in much the same way as the English "crap."  His other favorite senteces are "I would like to be left alone", "I would like to leave this show", and "My life is hell."

    My new favorite show.