At Floriade, Tulips Are Just A Start Never go to the Netherlands in April without your woolies. It may be 80 degrees one day (the day before you arrive) and 40 degrees and raining the next, with an icy wind blowing off the North Sea. Like the one that blew my umbrella inside out as I stood, groggy from seven hours on the plane, trying to get my bearings outside Amsterdam’s Central train station. (Leave the umbrella home; it’s useless.) I went directly across the tram tracks to an old-fashioned cafe and tried out my Berlitz phrase book, “Ik wil graag een kopje espresso.” Then I had another. The coffee in the Netherlands is rich and bracing and probably evolved because centuries of tulip pilgrims needed to jump start their hearts after slogging over the sodden polders — the flat Dutch fields that would still be under water had not all those dikes been built. I had come in mid-April to see the bulbs blooming at Floriade 1992. But unlike rational beings, tulips don’t show their faces in bone-chilling gales and under pouring rain. There were thousands planted, of course, and thousands more daffodils and hyacinths (the fragrance of these … Meer lezen over The New York Times | Anne Raver – At Floriade, Tulips Are Just A Start