Amsterdam: Day 6 -- Flower Time!

Today we decided to go see some flowers. The first order of business was catching an early bus to a flower auction in a nearby suburb. It was going to be an hour-long ride, but our bus scraped up against a double-parked delivery truck, so we were forced to go to the next bus stop and await the following bus. Since we'd been in the area the day before, we were able to find the next stop, and about 10 minutes later, we were back on our way!

The flower auction is held in the largest commercial building in the world, so we didn't need to look too hard to determine which bus stop was ours! After going inside, we saw millions of flowers waiting to be purchased and hauled away. I took a video of the action:


In the middle of all of this were several bidding rooms where people were buying all different kinds of flowers. It was very interesting to see how all these flowers get sold!

Back on the road, we took another bus back to a bus terminal where we switched to a bus that was supposed to take us to another bus terminal near the airport. However, this bus stopped just shy of the airport, so we had to hop out and jump on a different bus to take us the rest of the way. Once we got there, we saw the bus we needed to get to the Keukenhof (a large flower exhibition).


Finally, we arrived at the Keukenhof. The flower displays were very nice, and we certainly got a chance to see all the tulips we had been missing during the earlier part of the trip! Not counting kids being dragged there by their parents, I'd say we were the youngest people there by about 30 years! Gangs of wheelchairs clogged most of the pathways as we tried to make our way around.

After seeing our fill of flowers, we took another couple of buses back to the city and walked back to our hotel.