Friends, flowers, farmers.

I had two guests over this week, old friend (Hon) and newer friend (Tine). It was great fun because my spare(ish) time-table meant that I could skip a few classes here and there, heh. Here we are having "typical Dutch" food of andijvie stamppot (mash of potatoes, escarole and hard-boiled eggs mashed together) and hete bliksem stamppot (mash of sweet potatoes, shallots, and apples) with sausages.

In our search for more typical Dutch things, we decided to go find some flower gardens. Since we didn't want to pay the 15 euro entry fee to the Keukenhof flower park, we searched for the flower farms around the tourist attraction from Google Satellite. It was a long bus ride on Connexxion 90 from The Hague Centraal Station to bus stop 'Narcissa', a fitting name for the rows upon rows of narcissen or daffodils that we were about to find. In all permutations: yellow and yellow, white and yellow, white and orange, yellow and orange...

We waved to a family of farmers in the distance and spoke to them as they cut a row of white tulips, to be refrigerated for a week before being made into bouquets for Easter. Here the mum and daughter are checking that the tulips are being cut right above the bulbs, while the dad drives the blade through the row, attached to his tractor.

Packing the cut tulips into boxes.

A lone red tulip growing among the white ones.

Wandering amongst private property seems pretty safe, as long as we're far away from the houses themselves. We found hyacinths growing in peach, pink, white and blue rows...

and some kind of small crocus-like flowers in bright red and dark pink.

We got to pick up discarded tulips and revived them at home, and later they made it all the way to Ghent alive, yay!

Hon sniffs the fried rice, Tine sniffs the tulips