Queens Day

Queens day, or ‘Koninginnendag’ in Dutch, has to be one of the best festivals to be found around the world; though, admittedly, a bit of nationalistic pride might play a factor in that. Anyways, I got to celebrate it once again and had a blast. The city of Amsterdam flooded with an extra 500,000 people (which isn’t bad, considering that the city has only just over a million people itself). That isn’t as many as the last time I was here, eight years ago, but then it didn’t go half as wrong this time as it did that time.

The last time I was here the MA (military police) got pulled out because the trains were no longer driving and the people were pissed and charged the stations. Of course at that time there were only fifty cops to stop about 50,000 protesters – so they pulled out the tear gas. I somehow got stuck in the middle of that (and tear gas really sucks, I can tell you that!). No, I didn’t get out of the city that night, instead I had to crash at a friendly professor’s house. Nice guy, by the way.

This time around nothing like that happened – though admittedly it did rain a bit – and instead we just walked around, watched thousands of people (most of them drunk, stoned, off their heads or all three) drank beers, walked, met friends, met family and generally had a great time (except for the bit where I was scared my fingers were getting frost bite.)

Queens day is brilliant, as it’s basically is a free festival where the best Dutch musicians (and a few foreign ones) play everywhere around the city. There’s DJs, Dutch folk singers, internationally renown (Dutch) bands and even the occasional foreign talent (yes, even outside of Holland the Dutch Queens day is semi-famous).

And you know what? Quite a number of people started speaking to me in English asking if I was a tourist. At least they asked – that means they weren’t quite certain if I was Dutch or not. It could have been worse, but the general take on my nationality seems to be Italian or Spanish. I don’t have any Italian or Spanish in me and, unless I need some transplant, I hope never to have any either (straight, I’m sorry).

And that was Queens day. Brilliant. Already looking forward to the next one. Hopefully some of you can join me for that one. You’re more than welcome to!