Someone from home told me about the Amsterdam Flower Auction as a must do attraction. I can't remember who- was it you? If so, thank you! The auction is at the end of the bus line that goes by our apartment. It starts at 6am Monday- Friday and is open to visitors from 7am on. They advise you to arrive early to see a lot of the action. Rising early isn't really a problem these days so I decided to check it out with Jude! Karin was also game to go and it was great having a travel buddy.
Flowers are shipped to Schipol airport from around the world with Kenya, Ethiopia, Israel, Belgium and Germany being the top five import countries. The total area of the operation is the size of 220 soccer fields! Some other stats: 9.6 million euro is turned over from 34.5 million flowers and plants per day!
We walked into the gigantic warehouse and were greeted with this scene:
The flowers are transported around the room on automated tracks and then individual racks are moved by the workers who reminded me of Sim City.
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| We were amazed! |
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| The flowers were so perfectly packaged. |
Towards the end of the walkway we got to one of the auction rooms. Here, buyers were seated stadium-style and the flowers to be bid on rolled out automatically. The screen shows the Dutch auction system, which looked very complicated, but thankfully a tour guide was explaining the system to a small group of American tourists and we eavesdropped. The flowers are bid on per stem. Some as cheap at 19 euro cents!
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| How do you train for and get this job?! |
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| Trying to capture the enormity of the operation! |
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