Where We Get To Experience The Dutch Version Of Amok Time
But Found Some Tulips
April 27 – King’s Day
April 27 is King’s Day in the Netherlands. For a full explanation of King’s Day, take a look here. Briefly – it’s a national holiday to celebrate the birthday of the Dutch king, Willem Alexander. Everybody has a day off, and the country goes just a smidge meshuganah for a day. Oranage is the color of the royal family, who has connections to the Orange area in France from several hundred years ago.
Festivities had already started the evening of April 26. It was a bit of a challenge for our uber driver to work his way around the already closed streets filled with partiers to get us to our restaurant. This included a food delivery truck that parked at an odd angle one of the super narrow streets. The driver saw us in the uber car, and just continued on his delivery of fresh fruit and vegetables into an apartment building. Our uber driver gave the delivery guy and earful when he finally surfaced.
Getting back to the hotel was equally challenging, because by the time we left the restaurant partiers completely clogged the street and bridge where we needed to turn (which is apparently against one of the 9,324 rules regarding Konnigsdag). Our driver decided to proceed on at 1 mph, gently moving through the crowd as drunken people figured out that they were, in fact, standing in the middle of an active street. We should have gotten some video of that, but we were kinda amazed it was actually happening.
April 27 is the day we transfer from the hotel to the ship, but we had some time in the morning before we go, so we decide to put on our orange shirts and go in search of King’s Day festivities.
We started walking in the general direction of the city center, though we were warned to absolutely stay away from there due to the nuttiness.
We went quite a distance before we found a street with some vendors. One of the Konnigsdag traditions is for people to bring out their own personal possessions that they want to get rid of; the entire country is one giant flea market. As one of our tour guides said, “People sell their junk and then buy somebody else’s junk”. The street we were on had actual stores who moved their items out onto the street. We ended up buying a few things, including some packages of certified-for-import-to-the-US tulip bulbs for people back home. This was a good thing, because the flower market was closed, and I wasn’t sure where else we’d be able to buy bulbs.
And then there were the stumbling stones, are reminder of the Dutch Jews lost during the Holocaust.
We arrived back at the hotel just in time for the group photo that hopefully we’ll get from the ship’s program director at some point.
The transfer to the ship was as smooth as always. We were scooted off to lunch immediately upon boarding, while we waited for our stateroom to be ready.
We decided to go on the 3:30 p.m. “Welcome Walk”, even though we’d already been on a walking tour. Our first tour was from our hotel in the southern part of the city. Now we were in the northern part of the city, so we expected it to be different.
Which it was. We walked directly into clumps of partiers, making navigation entertaining.
Other photos from our walk, once we pushed through the parties.
Since our ship was docked next to a bar overflowing with partiers. Our tour guide realized that the bar *could* just move aside one of the temporary fences and let us walk through to the dock avoiding the long walk up the block and then back down a cobblestone ramp. It took some convincing – not sure the bar owner thought we were going to do by climbing through her fence – but eventually she relented. Maybe we all looked pathetic enough, who knows.
Our first dinner was great – we had a fantastic conversation with 4 brits. And this is what traveling is all about.
Tomorrow: Canal cruise and hopefully the Jewish Museum.
Maryland Meshugas 