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Floating Flower Market

After a wonderful weekend in London, I realized my travel itch wasn't completely satisfied so the
following weekend I took a trip down to the Netherlands and got to experience the beautiful city of Amsterdam! I was there for 2 days, and it wasn't nearly enough time to see everything, but we packed as much as I humanly could into both days. One of the activities I did was visit the floating flower markets and oh my gosh they were beautiful. It was a long row of boats filled to the brim with flowers, seeds, and knick-knacks. All the flowers were in full bloom and completely surrounded you. There were flowers covering every surface of the boat, even the celling! The smell was the best part. The sweet scent of fresh flowers filled your nose in the best way.

I think flowers are one of the prettiest things on earth. I love how unique they all are, the different shapes, sizes, color, and smell of them all - they are just gorgeous. The only bad thing about going was the self-restraint I had to show. Since I had to go back to Ireland, I couldn't buy any flowers, even though I really REALLY wanted to. There were so many different kinds of flowers there. Tulips, sunflowers, orchids, roses, carnations, I could honestly keep going for a while. Another thing I like about flowers is their representation of Love.


People buy flowers for others to show them how much they care. Flowers work on every occasion.  Anniversaries, funerals, dates, birthdays, and just because. I think getting flowers is one of the simplest and sweetest gestures someone could do for a person. So being around so many of them just warmed my heart, especially when I saw my friend's favorite flowers as I was walking around. Although flowers have all different types of meaning, a personal favorite of mine is that the Rose is the symbol for love.

\Roses are scene in a multitude of different medias representing love, one of the first examples that comes to my mind the Disney Princess movie Beauty and the Beast - which just happens to be my favorite princess. Someone else who uses Rose's as a way to express love is poet Willam Yeats. He has a wide range of poems that mention roses, but one of my favorites is one he wrote in 1892 called The Love Tells of the Rose in his Heart". In this poem, the rose symbolizes the beloved, this person is someone the speaker holds so dear to him that he is scared of anything happening to her. The love in this poem is seen as pure and fragile, the thought of the horrors of the world harming her in anyway is terrifying. The last two lines really tie the whole poem together very nicely.

"For my dreams of your image that blossoms

A rose in the deeps of my heart."

The yearning in the poem is a bit gut-wrenching. He cares so much about this woman that he wants to remake the world to be worthy of this type of love. I recommend reading the entire poem to be
able to get the full effect of his love for this woman. To tie this back to the flower markets, I think the use of the rose to showcase his purity is brilliant. The poem is beautiful, the flowers were beautiful, and I had to best time being encased with the fresh scent of flowers and the symbolic meanings of the gorgeous blossoms around me.

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