North Holland, half day
Broeker Veiling: the vegetable auction you can bid at
A working auction until the 1970s, now a museum where you bid on the clock yourself and buy the vegetables. Boat ride included.
Half an hour north of Amsterdam, in Broek op Langedijk, is a wooden hall with a canal running straight through the middle of it. Growers used to steer their boats in one end loaded with cabbages, sell the load, and float out the other. It ran that way from 1887 until 1973, and it was the only sail-through auction of its kind in the world.
A thousand islands of cabbage
The landscape around it explains the building. This area was once known as het Rijk der Duizend Eilanden, the kingdom of a thousand islands: several thousand tiny plots of land separated by water, each one a farm too small to reach by cart. Everything moved by boat. Vegetables, cattle, the priest, the dead. When the auction was built, it was built for boats because there was no other way anything arrived.
The clock runs backwards
The auction itself works the way Dutch auctions still work, which is backwards from what most visitors expect. The clock starts high and falls, and the first person to press the button wins at whatever price the hand had reached. Hesitate and you pay less but risk getting nothing. Press early and you are certain, and you have overpaid. It is a machine for making people uncomfortable, and it is still the mechanism behind the flower auction at Aalsmeer, which handles a large share of the world cut flower trade every morning.
At the museum you sit at a real bidding desk and do it yourself, with real produce, and you take home what you win. Groups take this considerably more seriously than they intend to.
Why it makes a good half day
It is a good answer for a second visit, or for a group that has already done Zaanse Schans and Volendam and wants something the coach crowd has not found. It is indoors, which makes it weatherproof, and the boat trip through the old growing plots gets you out on the water without the queue for a canal cruise. Pair it with Alkmaar, twenty minutes away, whose cheese market runs on Friday mornings from spring to autumn.
