Haarlem the Flower City of the Netherlands

Please do not be upset if you are from the Netherlands as I fully appreciate that there are flowers everywhere here in the Netherlands. It is an enormous part of the culture and I applaud it. I love seeing people balancing huge bouquets and their shopping and their children on bicycles. (Well sometimes I don’t love that – but I am always impressed that it is done, just looks a bit scary to me). I am staggered by the number of florists, flower stands and then of course the wonderful miles and miles of rivers and ribbons of colour across the land as the flowers begin to bloom. I just love it.

But you cannot get away from Haarlem the Flower City.

We don’t read Dutch very well – so we were aware of the “flower parade” but hadn’t worked out when it would be, and we had been on holiday to Switzerland and meandered back through Germany and arrived home on the Flower Parade day. It was a wet and miserable Saturday April 25th. The parade began in Noordwijk at 9.30 and completed its 40k journey around 9pm in Haarlem. Of course we didn’t know any of that. We went for a walk to recover from a long train journey from Berlin and we saw flowers, tables & chairs & umbrellas out along the route all looking very wet and dismal. We asked at our StamCafe what it was about and were told the parade comes by here and stops. The procession would probably have about 20 large floats and lots of decorated cars, interspersed with marching bands and marching girls.

We sat outside the Coach House Inn as the rain seemed to have virtually halted and waited. Eventually a tired wet parade arrived – and there was not much to see because only a few floats went past us and then they stopped. The parade stops here. Well that is what he said and it did.

We did walk around and take a few photos and we promised a young Candian couple who were visiiting Haarlem for the parade, that we would take more in daylight and post the photos in this blog so they could see them – because the parade literally stopped there – right where we were.

And the party that should probably have occurred was rained out – it really was a fizzer.

But we can look forward to next year – this will happen again on Saturday April 24th and we will not be tired after a long train trip and it will not rain on our parade.

Tags: annual flower parade, celebrations, flowers, rain