Exams done, assignments handed in. Two weeks of nervous breakdowns and anti-socializing; FINITTO! All I can hear is Freedom!’90 by George Michael in my head (the difference between the first version of this song by Wham! and this one is quite interesting, you can decide yourself what I mean). I actually bought a double album of his greatest hits for only 50 cents a year ago. I wasn’t a big fan of his music, but buying a CD felt more tempting than a Snickers bar at that moment. Money well spent (though I like to use “invest” when it’s about music).
Anyhow, it was time to travel somewhere again. This is how the conversation went at the train station in the morning:
Maria: “I still don’t know where we’re going.”
Me: “Mean either, but we’ll see eventually we’re we end up.”
It was hard to know where we were heading since my flat mates were pronouncing the name of the place in ten different ways. But there was talk about seeing a flower parade and garden. Yes, it’s about time to be a true tourist again.
Leiden Centraal is where we went, and caught the bus to Keukenhof, a famous garden in The Netherlands, and expensive. PFF €21 for entrance and bus. And the LINE! It took quite a while to get in the bus, that I and Maria had a quick sightseeing in Leiden. Well, only walked one street and back.
The bus ride to the garden took about 25 min, and we got to see some interesting monuments of Leiden, but as we were approaching our destination, every now and then people went “WOOOW”, because of the impressive tulip fields. As we arrived there, we went to wait for the flower parade to pass by. Here I would like to emphasize the word “wait”. It’s ok for musicians to start their show late, but not an annual parade, which has a tight schedule and thousands of people from around the world coming to witness. After one hour of people taking pictures of single cars with people selling CDs, the parade finally started.
First car. 10 minutes. Starts to rain a bit. Second car. 10 minutes. Announcement: “One of the car’s tires is flat; you will have to wait for a long time.” #):@(%#¤” Never mind let’s go to the garden, we’ve seen enough, besides we got the newspapers with the drawings of the cars that we could have seen.
I don’t think we saw the whole garden, since it was so big. There were a lot of Spanish, Russians, Chinese, Indians etc. It was quite crowded, but I heard it can be even more crowded.
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I’m glad that I got my jumping photos and ran in the tulip fields. After the garden closed, we had to wait in a long line once again; luckily we weren’t going to Schiphol since that line was three times as long as ours.
I remember us international students asking a Dutch friend of ours if the tulip fields in the post cards are real, and not photoshopped. She wasn’t lying.
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