The Running of the Cheeses

Every Friday the city of Alkmaar hosts a traditional cheese market.  It's a largely a display for tourists, but they do sell several thousand kilos of cheese (to real purchasers.  You can't buy cheese here unless you get it from one of the side vendors).  In its heyday, the market moved over 300 tons of cheese a day.  After the buyer determines the quality and negotiates his price, the warehousemen load the cheese up on their little runner carts and take it to get weighed.  Once the cheese is weighed and paid for, the warehousemen run the cheese across the market to get loaded onto carts.  The running of the cheeses is the best part:

The cheese is then transferred onto the old-timey cart:

which is then pushed around the corner from the crowd of tourists and the cheese is loaded into giant trucks.  

If you like cheese, it's a perfect little half-day trip from the city.  Lovely Dutch lasses hand out samples and you can pose with a warehouseman with a big wheel of cheese, like Rob's mom did:  

So cheesy.