A sea of orange

Teens playing cool jazz, a flea market as big as a small country, and streets paved with crushed beer cans.

These are a few impressions from another unknown European holiday, Queen's Day in the Netherlands (King's Day from next year).

This year, the holiday got quite a bit of media coverage because Queen Beatrix resigned and handed over the position to her son. But, rather than showing the wider audience what the holiday is about, coverage had to focus on the ceremonies around the leadership change.

It's party time all over the country starting in the evening of April 29 and all day on 30 April.

The city of Amsterdam turns into one gigantic flea market for a day with miles and miles of people selling stuff on the sidewalks of the old quarters.

Clothes, books, vinyls, cds, homemade food, all sorts of junk from the basement, are on sale by the locals and people from the suburbs. Interspersed are musicians, or open windows with a pair of speakers out on the two square feet that pass for a balcony around here.

The souvenir shops have been bright orange for days now, selling leis, hats, t-shirts all orange colored -- not just the orange of the monarch's House of Orange but modern day's flouorescent orange.

On Queen's Day, some places give away bright orange fedoras by the shipping pallet. That swooning, pimply early twenties male with a stack of fifteen orange hats on his head is not trying to sell any, he just passed one of the handout points.


On 30 April, even the ubiquitous bicycles mostly stay "parked" in the heaps of intertwined metal along the canals. Walking is the only way to get around, because the trams in the inner city are shut down, too.

You can meander from the loud, techno music heavy, main thoroughfares to the small side canals where the inhabitants of the houseboats are sitting out front, offering a few of their treasures for sale, giving their dogs a view of the happy revellers.

Soon, you will notice that certain groups of people gravitate to certain areas. The old quarter of the Joordan attracts lots of families, and it is here where you can find the teenage kid band on the sidewalk playing so well that you know they will become household names if they keep it up for a few more years.
It is here that the young hippies and the old ladies sell clothes last worn in the 1950s.
The under ten year old girls selling off some of their toys or making a few euros from homemade cupcakes and freshly pressed orange juice.

Out, towards the Museumplein, the scene is more dj music for the twenties crowd, hundreds of people sucking on orange balloons, and you know it's not the air or the helium because patches of the green space are littered with discarded whipped cream nitrous cartridges.

Somewhere along the way, there are the other queens, those who will remain queens, and their rainbow flags have a stripe of orange, too.  They form an incredibly dense mass of humans, yet they part almost as if they were performing an agreed-upon comedic parody of the ol' Moses and the Red Sea. Then we realize that one of us is wearing a baseball hat with a rainbow emblem.

The canals themselves are party boat heaven. There are small boats with families and bigger boats with happy drinkers and big sound systems. Don't try to count either the boats or the cases of beer and hard liqour. The bridges being so low, you can almost shake hands with the partiers below, and you can spend hours watching people play a game of chicken as they approach the bridges. On most boats, you will hit your head if you stand up straight, so people will duck and do it as late as humanly possible.
Drunk driving enforcement on the crowded canals? It's self-policing all day, and it seems to work. Only the big white swans seem to be a bit confused at the beginning, and they go hide in quieter places but return as soon as the boat traffic lets up.

Tourists from all over the world hit the shops to get a piece of orange to fit in, despite initially having been caught by surprise at the prospect of the museums being shut down for the day, having been slightly weirded out by the signs on the shops telling you that taking a leak or using the bathroom will cost you 1 euro.

It is one huge, friendly party, and the absence of the puddles of puke and vomit that you will find in any British drinking district any weekend of the year is remarkable.

Having been out for a whole day in a crowd estimated at just under a million people without having encountered a single belligerent drunk and just a couple of panhandlers is either sheer luck or indicates something quite nice.

Mark your calendar for King's Day 2014.