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Miss Manners We cycled back two kilometers to Keukenhof where the world's largest tulip flower show was held each year. The price they charged was tantamount to gouging. Food was outrageously priced also so we went hungry. The displays were great. Every kind of tulip I could imagine except... where were the blue tulips? We toured through two immense green houses filled with tulips, inkalilies and irises. At one juncture, I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror and almost didn't recognize myself. What a sight! No wonder those people didn't want us camping in their yard. My scraggly beard didn't help matters. There was a photographic tulip display by a Canadian photographer. Quite a few shots were from Ottawa. Since the second World War, the Dutch had been sending tulip bulbs to Canada every anniversary. Ottawa had one of the world's most enviable tulip collections. One photo showed a red coated Mountie bending over two kids in a tulip field. The caption read: "When kids love tulips too much the law cannot be far behind!" There was an excellent display of the year's tulip cartoon contest. I enjoyed them more than the flower displays. In a panel cartoon a guy with a red nose sniffed a yellow tulip. By the final panel the tulip was red and his nose was yellow. Others depicted an Englishman smoking a tulip pipe; a guy happily watering tulips with a steam roller; a man peeing on a building with an onion shaped top that sprouted a tulip; a bee going into yellow tulips and when it left the tulips were red; men looking at a tulip display and in their minds saw the patterns as naked women; Van Gogh painting tulips; wilted tulip wallpaper being replaced with fresh wallpaper; an old man observing wilted tulips -- a young girl walked by and the tulips stood up. In town I bought sweet bread, similar to a large cinnamon bun. The best we had since Canada. We devoured the bread while standing under a roof ledge out of the rain. I went back and bought another. The vendor asked me if I had come all the way from England to buy them. Annette, our sister-in-law, had relatives in Holland. We had planned on being at her aunt and uncle's that evening, but with the pouring rain and steady headwind our progress was slower than usual. Almost dark, on the outskirts of Haarlem, Sharon insisted we stop and camp in the woods. She informed me it would be impolite to show up at someone's house at nine p.m. without having called first. (They didn't speak English, so we hadn't called.) She was right, but in the hammering rain, I didn't think it was a good time to turn into Miss Manners. |
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