Today began bright and early; we were on our way to Royal FloraHolland just after 6 AM. This company serves as the largest international floriculture marketplace for many varieties of flowers and other plants. The building is just under 2 million square meters, making it nearly as large as, if not larger than the country of Monaco. The flowers are sold via an auction process in which a dot, denoting the price of a single stem of the featured variety, moves around a (1 Euro) circle, becoming cheaper and cheaper until the first person decides to buy the flowers. It isn’t your standard auction process where prices only climb higher, but rather similar to a game in which you try to get the lowest price for your flowers before anyone else throws in their ideal price. The auction opens at 6 AM, and the company had 22 million flowers to sell to its consumers today alone.
Our tour of Royal FloraHolland was self-guided and consisted of us walking on a bridge above the bustling workspace below. The walk was roughly a kilometer-long straight line to get to the other side of the facility, showing just how large the building is. One of the most admirable facets of the tour was being able to witness the organized chaos that is Royal FloraHolland firsthand. As we walked on the bridge, hundreds of human-driven carts zipped by one another, flowers were constantly being pumped into rows by conveyor tracks and hanging lines, there were rooms full of people building boxes to deliver the flowers in, and much more occurred at once. I feel like if the warehouse were viewed from above, it would look like an ant farm with how much activity and constant movement and action was present. The company has also taken steps to be sustainable, such as using rechargeable, battery-powered carts, cleaning and reusing the containers the flowers are transported in, and having some employees use bicycles to traverse the building to cut down emissions even further.
After our time at Royal FloraHolland had ended, we stopped at RDSM. RDSM is a former ship-building factory that was reworked completely, and is now the house of several lively, artistic office spaces. It appeared almost as if there were vibrant city streets inside the building, with just how the offices were designed.
Once our time at RDSM had ended, we walked for twenty-or-so minutes to make it to Schoonschip, an incredibly sustainable neighborhood in which every house floats on the water of a canal. One of the locals of Schoonschip was kind enough to give half of us a tour, while her neighbor showed the rest of the group around. We learned that the community took a LOT of work to create, from finding different architects to create non-uniform houses to biweekly community meetings. Several steps were taken to make Schoonschip as sustainable as possible, including solar panels, underwater heat pumps, shareable battery electricity, and reused concrete for the bases of each houseboat. One primary takeaway from our visit to this community was that all members of Schoonschip had to come together and put in lots of work to create as beautiful and sustainable of a community as it is.
After we left Schoonschip, we went to Pllek, a restaurant whose frame appeared to be made almost entirely of reused shipping crates. Afterwards, we took a ferry ride across the canal to the city, and took a tram from there to the Rijksmuseum. I was shocked by just how much this museum held. From shipwreck finds to weapons to musical instruments to one of Van Gogh’s own self-portraits, the Rijksmuseum holds several pieces of art and history to appeal to almost every attendee. After the museum, I ended my day early and went to our hotel to relax and recharge from the early-starting, activity-packed day until bedtime.
