Queen's Day

  Amsterdam, Netherlands
Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Where to start with Queen's Day? Imagine an Orange St.Patrick's Day on steroids and you are starting to come close. This was a day like no other.

We all started at the Victoria Hotel (a meeting point opposite Amsterdam's Central Station, which will be our hub for our time in this region). Here we met up with Dutch GSE Team Esther, Mariska, Marloes and Peter, who were all ready to show us how Holland parties. This was a brave scheduling decision by the Rotary District! Vince's luggage still has not arrived.

Koninginnedag (or Queen's Day) is the Queen of the Netherlands' birthday. If only Australians celebrated in such a way! At least a million extra people from all corners of Holland invade Amsterdam for this day. In regional areas, they also celebrate. For example, Dutch GSE team leader Greet was in her home town of Alkmaar helping at a Rotary market.

In Amsterdam, rules fly out the window on this day and from first thing in the morning, people were in the streets (all wearing orange) drinking Heineken, dancing, singing, and doing whatever made them smile. Orange is the national colour of Holland. The royal family's name Oranje comes from the town in France from which they came, and hence the Dutch always wear this colour. This one day of the year is a huge national celebration.

Our team got into the spirit of the occasion by wearing some orange as well. Amongst the team, we had orange foam rubber crowns (free from the train station), orange shirts, orange socks, and even orange underpants. Admittedly most of these were worn by Adrian, except for the underpants which were proudly Walter's.

We walked and we walked and we walked today. Everywhere the crowds rubbed shoulder to shoulder. Our team had never experienced crowds of this magnitude anywhere in the world. We saw orange cowboys, an orange Elvis, men in orange dressing gowns, women dancing in orange bikinis, orange afro wigs, orange silly string, and even oranges themselves were being sold by street vendors.

Queen's Day is the one day of the year when anyone can sell anything without tax. People lined the sides of the streets with their own stalls of any type of goods you can think. Many were conducting their own special garage sale of old clothes, trinkets, CDs and even flippers. Innovative Amsterdammers pushed shopping trolleys full of Heineken and ice to sell to willing purchasers. We're contemplating returning next year and selling orange stubbies. Food vendors sold traditional Dutch croquettes, poffertjes, bacon sandwiches, and of course, plenty of Heineken and Grosch.

Spotted around the city were large stages in the various city squares, all hosting different concerts and activities. The largest was a day-long pop concert at Museumplein. They were expecting 300,000 at this concert alone and probably had more. Here we sampled the croquettes, plus frites (hot chips) with mayo. Other parks had more alcohol and house music, whilst there was a children's area at Vondelpark. Around here were parents pushing their Dutch-designed Bugaboo prams in every conceivable colour, yes including orange!

As the day unfolded and we marched around even more of Amsterdam, we saw traffic come to a standstill along the canals - there were so many boats enjoying this one great party that they could fit no more boats in! Music blared out of boats, buildings and bars. Adorned in orange, the Dutch continued to dance and be merry. We did our best to experience it all. And this was only our second day!