Koninginnedag!

Once in a while, an event comes along that does many things, one of them being to improve our spelling. For example, we all learned ten years ago how to spell millennium (double L...double N...). I also became familiar with the correct placement of double letters when writing my blog posts about the Colosseum. And now I have a new word to add to the list of strange-words-I-now-know-how-to-spell: Koninginnedag.

Koninginnedag

Koninginnedag

One n, one n, double n. One n, one n, double n. One n...

Enough about how to spell it. Koninginnedag -- Queen's Day -- is a Dutch National Holiday held every year on April 30. I had never heard of Koninginnedag until a few months ago when I was looking up Dutch national holidays on Wikipedia. (I also memorized every member of the royal family, but that is another story). Now, you could jump over to Wikipedia right now and read what they have to say, or you could keep reading my description here. I'd like to think mine is a more thrilling account, but that is for you to judge.

Koninginnedag is celebrated all over the country (the Queen was going to be in Middelburg, remember?), but Amsterdam is the place to be. It's like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or New Year's Eve in Times Square. That many people, that much excitement, that much garbage. It was quite the event.

What does "quite the event" look like, you ask? "Quite the event" gives me no solid facts, you bemoan. I'm going over to Wikipedia, you declare. Hold your horses. I will tell you everything about Queen's Day that you need to know.

In a nutshell, Queen's Day is this: Central Amsterdam as you know it shuts down. No cars, no bikes. The trams are rerouted around the center. Hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. Everyone wears orange. People hold rummage sales on the sidewalk. Open air concerts can be found everywhere, the largest one being in Museumplein where a few hundred thousand of the people have gathered.

Quite the event, huh?

Now for a few more details. First of all, Koninginnedag is an example of oranjegekte (orange craze). Most people wear at least a little bit of orange, and some go for crazy outfits. At least 50% of the orange I saw came from free inflatable crowns.




















I went downtown with Anna and Bonnie, and we were well outfitted to blend in with the crowd. (This was the only day that our outfits would be considered "blending in"!)



















Once you don your orange craze outfit and go into Amsterdam, you realize that many, many other people have had the same idea as you. Basically every street we walked down looked like this:




















or this:



















or this:



















That last picture was in Rembrantplein, probably the most crowded area we went through. That was where I learned to surrender any attachment I still had to the concept of personal space.

Those who are not inching their way through the streets have climbed onto boats:


























































Koninginnedag is also known for being the one day that people can hold a vrijmarkt (garage sale without the garage), so on the outer edges of the center, sidewalk sales are everywhere. I wondered how people kept that much stuff in their homes every day but yesterday? Vondelpark is reserved as the area where kids can come sell their toys.



















But let me tell you -- the kids of Amsterdam are entrepreneurs. They have come up with all sorts of ways to make money in Vondelpark. They sell baked goods, set up carnival games, and perform dance numbers. And (my favorite) many kids have hauled out their band instrument from home and play a little music:



















Mostly very cute, but when you have a saxophone and two violins competing for air space five feet from each other, the result is not so pleasant. Also, no matter how good you are, the recorder will never sound good.

Entry-level band pieces are not the only music filling the Amsterdam air. There are also dozens of concerts happening all over the city, from small stages shoved into alleways to the giant Radio538 concert in Museumplein.



















What was my favorite part about the concert at Museumplein? Hearing Gerard Joling sing Ik Leef Mijn Droom, of course!






















I'll put up a short video too, but it comes with some warnings. First, the visuals are dizzying. Second, one of our crowd neighbors chose THIS song to start talking to us and ruined most of my videos with his talking. This video is the least bad of them all, but you can still hear him in the background speaking in Dutch and me saying I had no idea what he was saying. After this video he switched to English, but I still had no idea what he was saying.

Anyway, see if you can pick up from the video a few of Gerard's dulcet tones. Ik leef mijn droom, oh oh AY oh!



Since most of the excitement of Queen's Day came from the general noisiness of the atmosphere, here is another video of "The Sounds of Koninginnedag." See if you can hear the awesome horns that one too many people got their hands on.



One last thing about yesterday -- the trash collectors of Amsterdam chose a strategic time to go on strike, the one day when the most garbage accumulates on the streets. I got used to the sound of walking on cans/bottles and chose not to ever look down. Actually, in most situations I was too close to other people to see my feet anyway.

Does that give you a better idea of what Koninginnedag is like? It was definitely one of those days for me where I kept mentally pinching myself and going, "Am I really here?" Yesterday was a holiday in every sense of the word -- normal life as we know it stopped in Amsterdam, and a musical, flea market, orange craziness descended on everyone. Anyone want to come back next year? ;)