Alkmaar

The train to Alkmaar is pleasant and quick, just like every other train ride in this country. We pass many green fields with sheep and cows, and I try to take pictures of them through the window. Farmland is cut across by small channels of water, mini-canals, it seems. The land is so flat, and so empty; the sky looks so big up above. And always, there are clouds, big puffy clouds and flatter smooth clouds, moving fast across the blue-gray. We count windmills as we pass them.

When we get to Alkmaar, it is drizzling. We walk out of the station and pass the huge grote kerk, the "big church" that is central to every village and town in this region. This particular church is covered in a greenish moss and is surrounded by a tree-lined courtyard. We pass a cheese shop with my last name and I proudly stand under its signage to take a picture.

Alkmaar is famous for its cheese auction, held every Friday morning April through October. The cheese auction is called for ten o'clock, and we are several minutes early. Already, the central plaza is roped off with metal barricades to keep the people away from the cheese. In the center of the plaza are long piles of cheese. At least I assume they are cheese; each pile is covered with a white tarp, and signs sticking out from them read, "Gouda," and a price. We taste some sample cheeses from one of the carts lining the square. I'm not so into Gouda, I have to say, it's too soft and bland for me. But the cheese lady (one of many) also has goat cheese, which I love, so we buy a whole slice of that and gobble it up.

It starts pouring rain, so we quickly hide under the shelter of an overhang at the edge of the plaza. I'm not sure we're allowed where we are standing, but there are several other people with us, and besides, they still haven't started yet. Inside the building beside us is a huge scale, the kind that hangs from the ceiling, is made from iron and could probably hold a standing cow on each balance. After some minutes, a cheese official shooes us out and we have to join the hordes who are standing behind the barricades, some with their own umbrellas, some under restaurant umbrellas.

This is what happens at a cheese auction:

1. A lady talks into a microphone for a long, long time. Most of it is Dutch. Her accent is so thick that even when she speaks English it is hard to understand. So I have no idea what she talks about. Perhaps she comments on our overall enthusiasm level, which is a bit lacking other than the row of cheering children near the front.
2. Men in white lab coats walk around with clipboards. At each pile of cheese, they stop, lift the tarp, take a wheel from the pile, and cut it up. They taste one piece and give some to the crowd. Then they write down stuff.
   
3. Young women in traditional Dutch dress walk around the plaza next to the barricades doing not much other than looking like traditional Dutch cheese maidens. I think that's what they're going for. They have white Amish bonnets, red neck scarves, blue apronish dresses, red socks, and wooden clogs.
   
4. Cheese Guilde Men cart wheels of cheese, eight at a time, on a special wooden harness stretcher. They carry them to the big scale in the front, and then they carry them back to a wheelbarrow, which is then wheeled to a cheese truck out of view. the Cheese Guilde Men wear all white except for their hats, which are like little straw play bonnets, only painted yellow, red, green, and blue, and tied with a coordinated ribbon. The Head CGM wears an orange hat to show he is in charge. (If he showed up in America dressed like that he would for sure be beat up.)
5. CGM continue to cart the cheese to the scale and to the truck.
6. This goes on for more than an hour.
   
7. Most people leave the square as it has become quite boring.

So that's a cheese auction, now you know. We left after forty minutes to go to the local Beer Museum, called the Biermuseum in Dutch, which was cute, but not terribly exciting. I watched a number of humorous Heinekin ads and learned how to brew beer, which I kind of sort of knew about from my bartending school days. (Calling it bartending school is a bit generous, I know.) When we left the museum, the CGM were still carting cheese.