Parents in Town

Both this weekend and Sunday of last weekend my parents were in town. Unfortunately I had to be in Hamburg Monday through Wednesday for work, but it worked out well as they just made a trip to Ghent and Bruges while I was gone. It was a good couple weekends and I got to see a lot of those things that I've been telling myself I'll do sooner or later but never get around to doing because they seem so close by.

Last Sunday we didn't do too much as I think my parents were pretty wiped out from the jet lag. I showed them around a few different parts of the city and we grabbed a drink in a cafe and then dinner at a place on Utrechtsestraat. They then headed off to Ghent and Bruges, where they seemed to have a really good time, and met back up Wednesday evening for dinner.

On Thursday we hit up a bunch of museums among other things - the Rijksmuseum (and the Iamsterdam sign), the Albert Cuypstraat market, the Amsterdam Historical Museum, and the Anne Frank House. I hadn't been to any of those museums, so it was good to finally get a chance to see them. We also had pretty perfect sunny weather, so it made for good walking-around-the-city weather.

On Friday I had to go to work, but first we had to see the Aalsmeer Flower Auction. It's a HUGE building (second largest building by square footage in the world!) by the airport where every day millions of flowers are flown in, auctioned off and flown out to their destination. There's a good chance the last time you bought flowers they went through that building. But, since speed is key to get the flowers to their destination before they start to wilt the auction occurs very early - every morning starting at 6:30am - so that the flowers can be on the first wave of flights out. Because of that, we got up really early, headed out to Aalsmeer, and even made it back in time for me to be not too late to work.

The building was pretty amazing - it was just huge, had colorful flowers all over the place, and had people zipping around on carts every which way. The auctions themselves were also really cool. All the buyers sit in one of 12 auction rooms, which look essentially like an auditorium with computer screens in the seats and two large projectors on the wall. On the projectors flowers are constantly being auctioned off and the actual flowers are brought along the front of the room for people to see. However, the auction doesn't work like you would assume - instead of multiple people bidding up the price the price starts high, then is lowered and lowered until someone makes a bid, and the first person to bid gets the flowers. Essentially like a game of chicken seeing how long you can wait before someone else takes what you want. It's not quite as dramatic as it sounds because whenever someone bids and gets some flowers there's usually more of the same that can be bid on right after, but still a very interesting process. After someone successfully bids on the flowers, they are zipped around the warehouse to the buyers cart, then the full cart is zipped of to a plane, train or truck to start the journey to their destination.

Flowers

...flowers

FLOWERS!

Flowers moving all over the place

Buyers in the auction room

The auction board and flowers being brought through

So, after flower spotting early in the morning it was a day of work (while my parents went to some sights I had already seen) and then a casual dinner with the parents. On Saturday, it was back to sightseeing in full force as we did a little people watching in Leidseplein, went on a canal boat tour, went to the World Press Photo exhibit in Oude Kerk and did some more people watching on a cafe in Spui.

Canal tour

You can see 7 bridges through here

Beach volleyball tournament in Dam Square

Chillin'

We called it an early night on Saturday, so we could get up early Sunday and go on a bike ride before it was forecast to rain at noon. Unfortunately it started much earlier and was already raining when we got going, but since it never rains too hard here and my parents really wanted to see the countryside we went anyways. It ended up being very cool despite the rain and I think my parents really enjoyed it. I took them on a route I've biked a couple times before - out of the city and up the Amstel river. Mom and I ended up going all the way to Uithoorn, which is about 20km away, so not a bad ride. The scenery is really cool and pastoral out there, and you get to see a lot of cool houses, boats, windmills and little towns. I also think it's amazing how the river is at a higher elevation than the surrounding land - the river is just supported by dikes on both sides so that the land can be solid enough to building and farm on (I still haven't quite figured out how the river flows out to the sea when Amsterdam and a good portion of the country is below sea-level though, so if any of you does let me know).

After that the weather was still a little gloomy and we were all pretty tired, so we just hung out, ate some lunch and watched the French Open final. All in all a busy and fun couple of weekends. It was good to see the parents for the first time since Christmas and I'm glad I got to show them around my hometown of the last 7 months. They had a lot of the pictures from this weekend so I'll have to get them and put them up here as well.