We had a pretty early start today, as we had to leave for our first location a little after 6 am. This location was Royal Flora Holland, a Dutch flower auction. I actually had to do research on this company as part of one of our pre-departure meetings, so it was interesting to see a lot of what I researched in practice. We did a self-guided tour of the facility, and got to see the workers transporting the flowers and learned more about how the auction worked.

After the flower auction, we visited a Tulip farm and got a talk from the owner about his tulips and how he grows them. It was interesting to learn how farming in the Netherlands was different, as the soil was quite sandy and the high-water level meant that the farm didn’t have to worry about irrigation. It was also nice to hear about how the farm dealt with sustainability. For example, the farm has to rotate where it plants its flowers every couple of years to prevent the soil from being damaged. This is another example of how being sustainable is necessary for a good product, as if the farm didn’t rotate it’s crops then the flowers would eventually not be able to be grown well at all and they would have a much worse product. So, being sustainable in this case can help prevent the farm from having a ruined harvest and going out of business. It’s good that companies actually have an incentive to be sustainable, as otherwise many likely wouldn’t care about sustainability if it didn’t affect their profits. We also ate lunch at the farm, which really was quite beautiful. It was nice to see a more rural part of the country, as just being in the city gives a limited perspective on it. It was weird how quick the transition from city to countryside was, though. Just one more difference from America.

We ended up finishing the farm tour pretty early, so we had some free time before dinner. I spent most of my free time reading Anne Frank’s diary, which I started about a week ago. I chose this book to read because we are visiting the Anne Frank house on Thursday, and felt that reading it would improve my experience. I’m almost done with it, but I’ll save my thoughts on it for Thursday.

After our free time, we had a Traditional Dutch dinner at a small restaurant. I do mean small, as we had difficulty in getting everyone in our group a seat. I had Stamppot with green chicory and a Meatball. It was pretty tasty, but I finished pretty quickly. This is probably because I’m a quick eater, as it wasn’t a small meal at all. This was the end of our activities for the day, so we spent some more time walking around the city. While we may have had more free time than I knew what to do with, it was still a fun and enlightening experience.