Saturday 1 May 2010

Queensday



We arrived in Amsterdam on queen's day. There have been queens (no kings) in Holland

for four generations now and queen's day is the queen's birthday. April 30th is actually the previous queen's birthday, but stayed that way after Beatrix's coronation 30 years ago as an honor to her mother and also because her own birthday is in january, too cold to celebrate.

Queen's day is a big thing in Holland. There is the free market to start with, everybody is allowed to sell anything on the street. Almost everyone is wearing something orange, the color of the royal Dutch family.




Alot of people go to Amsterdam to celebrate, most streets are closed for trafic so that people can just walk, dance and drink everywhere.


We were surprised about the amount of alcohol, the way of celebration changed during the past 15 years, back in the day it was mostly selling stuff, Amsterdam became a huge flea market. But now most people were selling food and everyone was drinking.


Always a weird thing from Amsterdam: the guys toilets. Due to the huge amount of beer there were also many of these toilets everywhere. They love chatting while having a leak.


Garbage was everywhere, mostly beer cans.


Today many people were working on get the city a bit clean again...

We were too tired to enjoy much of it as we went straight from the airport to the activities.
Tomorrow we'll meet up with some Etsy friends, looking forward to that!

7 comments:

  1. You were lucky to get in there as the trains got blocked too just before Amterdam..... it never had attracted me too, those crowded people. I moslty go to the good old Maastricht, hihihihi

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gosh! Never heard of public guys toilet before! Lol!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Your pictures convince I made a good choice yesterday: work in my studio on my huge canvas.
    thanks for sharing your images with us, I enjoyed looking at Queensday this way, from a distance and in that way - nice!
    Wishing you a lovely stay here and meeting with your Etsy friends, StaroftheEast!

    ReplyDelete
  4. can't wait :))) I hope you will bring some sun from Turkey!!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I love Amsterdam. Sometimes I dream of living there. But I think if I did, on Queen's Day I would take a trip to the country. he he Enjoy your stay!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sounds like I would have liked it better 15 years ago! Have fun tommorrow and the rest of your stay! :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. I am sure it must be a great experience to visit Amsterdam a day like this. I like the idea of how it used to be about the flea market sometimes it is sad that time and traditions changes.

    ReplyDelete