Where fresh flowers are a luxury in most parts of the world, they are on every street corner in Amsterdam. Literally. And cheap too: a nice bouquet will set only you back around 7 euros. This ties nicely into the fact that we like things to be cheap.

Tulips

Jokes aside, the quality of flowers in .nl is awesome and we are lucky because of it. The florists have been very succesful at marketing the message that you “say it with flowers” (zeg het met bloemen, since replaced by the current slogan gek op bloemen – crazy about flowers). Hordes of tourists come to our Keukenhof, which really is quite spectacular to see. Every other year an event called the Floriade is held, showcasing old and current flowers in a big way.

Marketplace

The biggest marketplace for flowers is called Flora Holland. This is an auction where grower meets wholesale. The scale of this operation is immense: every day at 5 AM or so a fleet of trucks comes in and unloads the flowers, the same day a different fleet leaves the terrain and ships the flowers worldwide. The fact that they are immediate neighbours of our largest airport Schiphol helps, too. On a smaller scale, flowers can be purchased on regular markets, in supermarkets, gas stations and on just about every streetcorner in large city centers. Amsterdam even has it’s own flower market (Google Image Search) where you can buy either fresh cut flowers or bulbs, ready to be taken on your airplane home.

Pink Gerbera

So where do all these flowers grow? During spring and summer, huge polders near Aalsmeer and Lisse are dedicated to flowers. Funny thing though. The flowers themselves are cut and discarded. It’s the bulbs they are after. This is the reason this part of Holland is called “bulb area” (bollenstreek). The flowers you can buy are also grown in the bollenstreek, but not on such a massive scale. You can buy flowers throughout the year in Netherlands, and this means in winter they are grown in greenhouses.

The quitessential cow – the one in the photo below – is named after Friesland, one of Netherland’s most northern provinces. This breed was born here, then developed in the USA by Dutch farmers, and after a century or so returned to Netherlands. Friesland cows are the most productive cows in the world. They can produce up to 25 liters per day, which is about 6.5 gallons.

Moooh.

A big discussion in Netherlands right now is milk from cows that are outside, as opposed to cows who stay indoor all the time. Milk from “buitenkoeien” (ouside cows) is deemed more nutricious by some. As such, we now have a special brand of milk from outside cows. I am not so sure this milk is more nutricious, but who am I. In line with the outside-cow-movement is the organic movement. Like in many Western cultures, organic food is very modern. Our organic milk is certicified by an independent organisation, but overall organic milk is still a tiny part of all milk sold.

Cow’s names

A name like Bettie 23 is a typical cow’s name. They are named after their mother: Bettie 1 will have been the first female cow the farmer has bought, their first daughter will have been Bettie 2, and so on. Even their grand children will all be named Bettie. This way, the farmer can keep track of the best-performing breeds. As you would expect, the male cows are sold when they are still young, because they do not produce milk.

After a milk cow has lived her useful life, she is sold to the butcher and turned into minced beef. As far as the environment goes, Dutch minced beef (from old milk cows) is a very sane choice. More so since our cows are not fed pulverized meat.

Fun cows facts

Do cows sleep standing up?

No, they don’t. They sleep lying down. But when a cow is lying down she might be digesting her food. Cows only really sleep deeply for half an hour per day. At other times she is just dozing and producing milk.

Do cows bite?

They only chew grass, so they don’t “bite” in the way you and I do. In fact they have no front teeth in their upper jaw. They only have big molars for grinding the grass, and do not use their teeth to fend off predators.

Do the yellow ear marks hurt?

No, not at all. Even setting them does not hurt, it’s just like an earring.

What does a cow weigh?

A regular milk-giving cow weighs about 650 kilograms. An adult bull can weig up to 1000 kg (a metric ton).

Netherlands is called that way for a reason. The country is very, very, very flat (i.e.; nether). In fact, about half of it is below sea level. And big parts of it used to be sea, but we drained the sea out. What you’re left with is polders. We would like to think of them as a typically .nl invention.

A polder is a Dutch piece of land that used to be sea. There is really no translation for it; a polder is a Dutch invention and very few other countries have a use for polders. A polder is surrounded by dijken and the soil is clay. As always, Wikipedia has an complete description about this phenomenon.

Polder south of Wilnis

In the olden days, we used windmills to drain the sea out of the polder. These are the iconic devices all tourist love. They are so typically Dutch I can feel a new blog post coming up even. In the mean time, if you are visiting Netherlands and would like to see some bona fide windmills, go to Kinderdijk. This is a tiny village in Noord Holland (one of our provinces) and it has the most photogenic windmills on the planet. But really, windmills are everywhere in our country.

Another polder, this one on the island of Terschelling

Back to polders. Well there really isn’t much to say about them. It’s just a flat piece of land almost always used to grow grain or potatoes. There is one notable exception. The polder called Haarlemmermeer (yes, Harlem Lake) was drained of sea to eventually fill up with airplanes. This polder is now home to our national airport Schiphol.

Ice skating is one of the great national sports in .nl, but only when it freezes. You see, all the water we have then turns to ice. And when all around you are great frozen lakes, beckoning for you to conquer them on ice skates, when the roads turn to a grey slosh, the call is irresistible. So when it freezes, seriously freezes, we ice skate. And we do it properly.

Ice skaters plus windmill

Ice craze

During those freezing times – last seen in January 2009 – a strange virus takes hold of .nl folk. It seems everyone has a pair of ice skates laying around, and time to go out and get on the ice. There are a few distinct classes of ice skaters. Everyday folk with everyday skates. Kids with hockey skates. And older people with long-distance skates (noren). All go outside at the crack of dawn and stumble across the frozen tundra.

The ‘official’ depth of the ice is 10 centimeters, at which point it is considered thick enough to hold the onslaught of Dutchies and assorted parafernalia such as chairs and food stands. But the official depth is pretty hard to reach: it has to freeze for over a week for the ice to grow that thick. So invariably after just a few days the first dare-devils will go out on the ice. Strangely enough, the older someone is, the more likely he/she will take the risk of early ice-capade. Presumably this is because older people long for the olden days when every winter used to be icy from November till March. So invariably the first accounts of natuurijs (natual ice) are accompanied with reports of people slipping into a hole in the ice (a wak) and the freezing of assorted body parts.

Serious sport

Then after a few days, when the freezing continues and the country is covered in a white blanket, the first cries for an “Elfstedentocht” are voiced. This long-distance ice skating marathon runs over eleven Frisian villages, hence its name, Eleven cities trip. Or quest rather, because it is a very strenuous and difficult trip. It requires very low temperatures for two weeks for all the ice surrounding these eleven cities to grow thick enough to support the contestants. But when it happens, oh boy the country is filled with joy. For a brief period, all is good, Netherlands is Nederland again, ice skate sales go through the roof and we all sit behind the tube, since the trip is broadcast verbatim across the country. Sadly, the last edition was in 1997. Thank you global warming.

Common scene across entire .nl in Winter

Of course, there are other sporting events besides the mother of all trips. The Dutch Championships run every year, since we have a plethora of indoor skating rings all over the country. But fairly soon after the first natural frost, the first outdoor national championships are held in shallow waters. We had the last one in January 2009. The best contestants of the national championships compete in Europe, and people from this pool compete in the Olympics as well. Tiny as .nl is, we have a fair number of world-class athletes who have won some serious medals. Innovations such as the klapschaats (clapping skate) are Dutch, too.

Food and beverages

Where there’s hoards of people, there’s others catering food and beverages. Outdoors ice skating is no exception and it will not be long before you see your first koek en zopie. Koek means cake or cookies and zopie means beverage, usually alcoholic. The term koek en zopie applies to every catering outfit on the ice and it is one of those strange Dutch words that every native seems to  understand without ever being explained. 

Hot chocolate is a favorite on the ice, with added rhum optional. All kinds of cookies and granola bars can be had as well, plus chocolate bars such as Mars and Snickers (insert local brand name chocolate bar here). On the hearty side, snert (thick pea soup) is abundant, as is the rookworst (smoked sausage), with a thick slice of bacon optional. As you’d have guessed, winter in .nl means serious calorie intake and huge amounts of animal fat. Just go along and worry about your diet when the temperature rises again.

This subject leads itself to so many puns it is funnier for me to stick to the facts and let y’all laugh amongst yourselves. The subject is dikes (dijken), sans any fingers in holes (grr! couldn’t resist) but with a couple of facts about these water stopping devices.

As the eskimos (alledgedly) have hundreds of words for snow, Nederlanders have literally tens of words for dijken: rivierdijk, zeedijk, ringdijk, binnenwaterdijk, buitenwaterdijk… you get the idea. But what, in actual fact, is a dijk?

Ringvaartdijk, Amsterdam Oost

It is a big heap of dirt that keeps water away.

You’d feel cheated out of your hard-earned money if I left it at that, so allow me to ramble on about these quintessential Nederlandse things. Today’s post is about the ringvaartdijk (pictured above) i.e. circular water dike. This type of dike has been instrumental in creating the Nederlandse landscape. They work as such: imagine a lake you would like to build houses/grow grass/produce cheese on. You divide this lake into manageable chunks by building dams in it.

Once you have your basic chunk you can start milling the water out of it. You do this by pumping it up and throwing it across (or under, as it happens) the dams. The water level drops and soon enough it’s land ahoy. But what to do with all the water that is now outside your patch of new earth? Simple. You pump this out some more until you’ve reached sea. Ringvaarten are the key step. They surround the (soon former) lake and are generally situated above sea level. Once the excess water is in the ringvaart, it can flow out into sea.

Ringvaartdijk, Amsterdam Oost, from the bottom of the former lake

As you can see, the difference in height is quite noticeable. The photo above was taken from the bottom of the former lake Watergraafsmeer, now a residential district of Amsterdam.

Typically, every dijk had a molen (windmill) for the pumping action but these days the water is pumped out with electric pumps, nicely tucked away in nondescript buildings. And yes, every day, every year, water is in fact pumped out of the former lakes. If this doesn’t happen, they fill back up again eventually. There’s no fighting nature even in Nederland.

Since Dijk is so instrumental to .nl, we have a rock group named so, many expressions and there’s even a website by American photographer Rachel James named aan de dijk.

I will cover other forms of dikes in coming posts.

If there is something Nederlanders do, it’s building bridges. No wonder with a country that’s more water than land. And cities that have more canals than Venice! (Not sure if that is actually true, but it sounds dramatic.) And if you think having the longest bicycle-bridge in the world is outlandish, wait ’till you’ve seen one of the many bridges in the busiest highways.

I will cover Nederlands’ bridges more than once on this blog, but the two I have lined up for this episode are one of the most eye-catching stuff we have.

Bruggen van Amsterdam

Bridges over the Leidsegracht, Amsterdam

No, not in bruges, but in Amsterdam is where you will find the bridges you know from postcards. If you look at the picture above, that is just one snapshot I took earlier without paying much attention to what I was shooting. These brick bridges are everywhere in Amsterdam, and the best thing is that they are essential to life in the city.

The bridges connect all parts of Amsterdam and urban, every day life would be impossible without them. Cars, bicycles, trucks, tourists, it all crosses these bridges countless times every day. They are well-maintained, painted, cleaned and in daily use. I know what you’re thinking. How quaint! And that is exactly what it is. You could also say how gezellig they are. But you would be wrong. There is nothing gezellig about bridges, they are just there as part of the road. We need them to cross the enormous amounts of water we have.

The bicycle bridge

Nescio Bridge, the biggest bicycle bridge of the world, east of Amsterdam

A friend of mine showed me this little gem (above): the Nescio Brug, the longest bicycle-only bridge in the world (see this beautiful shot on Flickr). “Nescio”, Latin for “I don’t know”, was the pseudonym of the Dutch writer Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh, born June 22, 1882 in Amsterdam. You mount this little puppy on your bike and are given a wonderful view of the IJ lake and the IJburg residential development. Then back down where it’s a half-hour trip to the center of Amsterdam.

This part of .nl, although decidedly flat, can be starting point for many great bicycle rides through polders and former lakes, now dry and developed for farming. Green grass, blue skies and black/wite Friesland cows, this area between Amsterdam and, well, Germany boasts some of the most typical Dutch views you will ever find. Who said this country was boring? (I did.)

The view on the polders, and bridges in actual highways, will be covered in an upcoming post.