May 2, 2019

Rotterdam bills festival after confetti throwing attempt

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 1:49 pm

During King’s Day at the Kingsland Festival in Rotterdam, people attempted to break a confetti throwing record, but failed. What also failed was the attempt at cleaning up the mess, since the organisers are being billed with extra clean-up costs.

Festival organisers had until 30 April (3 days) to clean up their mess, but there was still a lot of confetti to be found in the grass and the woods.

The city of Rotterdam is now cleaning the rest of the confetti up and will be sending the bill to the organisation. The city was completely OK with the record attempt as long as the confetti was picked up. It will take cleaners two more days to fully clean the area, to the tune of a few extra thousand euro.

Two local political parties were sceptical of the confetti attempt and now it turns out they were right. The city is also considering fining the organisation as well.

Everyone should feel like a King on King’s Day, but some people have ended up looking more like fools.

(Link: rijnmond.nl)

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April 28, 2019

Rainiest King’s Day since 1955 goes by without incident

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:15 pm

Yesterday King’s Day was the wettest in over 60 years.

With 8.9 millimeters of precipitation, only 1955 was rainier (9.6 millimetres), Parool reports.

Perhaps as a result King’s Day was otherwise uneventful, the papers say. Last year’s ‘disaster’, when beer ran out in the country’s capital, Amsterdam, was averted this year by readying more kegs.

The royal family visited Amersfoort, which joined in the uneventful trend by giving an undistinguished presentation, NRC writes. The organiser of the city’s festivities, Yordi Grutters, told the paper: “we are an average city with an average population.”

The paper adds that this was crown-princess Amalia’s day. For the first time ever, she gave interviews without her sisters to national broadcasters RTL and SBS. “It feels sometimes unreal that this is my life,” the princess said. I wonder how she knows.

Since the king’s inauguration in 2013, we haven’t had a King’s Day that wasn’t either cold or wet.

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May 4, 2018

‘Mistaken tourists’ show up for ‘Queen’s Day’ in Amsterdam

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 11:30 am

Celebrating its own bizarre fifth year anniversary this year, the ‘mistaken tourists’ (‘vergistoeristen’, in Dutch, a contender for the best word of the year 2018 in my view), are people who still show up in Amsterdam on 30 April on what used to be Queen’s Day, The Netherlands’ national holiday, dressed in orange garb and wondering where the party is.

In 2014 Queen’s Day was renamed King’s Day and moved to King Willem-Alexander’s actual birthday, 27 April, except if that day falls on a Sunday, then it’s on 26 April. The culprits seems to be outdated guide books and sites, holding on tight to Queen’s Day on 30 April and in doing so, pissing off a lot of tourists and giving us a chance to admire their editorial skills.

However, why would tourists and even websites have any reason to think a national holiday has moved back three days and can move around a bit more if 27 April falls on a Sunday? I wonder how many more years this will last, although I wonder if we’ll make it to a tenth year anniversary. Maybe then we should actually throw a party for the tourists.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

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April 28, 2018

Cool but dry King’s Day 2018

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 5:56 pm

King’s Day was cool yet dry at least in Amsterdam, and the dry part was the key since it is about being outdoors, whether you’re drinking or bargain hunting, or going for both.

Since every year we bring you pictures of anyone and anything orange, this year we went for what else we could we take pictures of for a change.

Some people had private parties, like Josée en Kees did. Or it was a birthday party admidst the rest, nobody knows. The photo is amusing as ‘feest’ (‘party’, pronounced ‘faist’) rhymes with ‘Kees’ (‘Case’, a man’s name).

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The food trucks and stalls were abundant this year, many of which were from neighbouring countries who got the memo a while back that The Netherlands is the place to be on King’s Day. I saw a lot of espresso, but Vietnamese spring roll stands stood out. Poffertjes, a Dutch classic, were also on offer.

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The best part of the day is when people want to pack it up and stop selling their old stuff and just put it next to the bins for collection. Some parts of town use let people dump their stuff in containers and yes, dumpster diving is socially acceptable at that point. If you look at this picture and think ‘there’s a perfectly good children’s bike in the trash’, you’d be right. The main reason we spend King’s Day in well-to-do neighbourhoods is because they leave the best stuff behind.

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Kudoz to the city of Amsterdam for providing quite a lot of free bathrooms women can use, as opposed to only urinals – it’s about damn time. However, in the posh part of town, ‘women and children’ could take ‘royal dumps’ sponsored by a good cause, although surely not for free. Feel free to wonder why men were excluded and then tell yourself you’re discussing bodily functions on King’s Day.

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April 28, 2017

Cold but animated King’s Day 2017

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:46 am

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King’s Day 2017 was colder than the previous Christmas, Weeronline.nl reports.

The temperature in De Bilt (where temperature for the country is measured) was 10.9 degrees, whereas at Christmas the temperature reached 11.8 degrees. Since 1949, when Queen’s Day was moved to April, this has happened only once before, namely last year.

People on social media are jokingly blaming King Willem-Alexander for the cold weather, as he moved the national holiday from 30 April to 27 April. Weeronline believes that the move of a mere 3 days does indeed make a difference. The average temperature on the 27th is one degree colder and on average also more rain falls.

In Amsterdam it hailed and rained a few times, but most of the time it was sunny with clouds. The 24 Oranges team braved the cold by dressing warm and, like last year, by hopping from bar to bar to drink warm beverages during our annual walk along the flea market of the Apollolaan and Stadionweg in Amsterdam.

We saw a lot of kids playing a decent violin and girl duos doing dance routines. As well, we heard more German-speaking sellers and noticed some serious Austrian traditional clothing sales.

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March 15, 2017

Tilburg to welcome royal couple with handkerchiefs

Filed under: Design,General,History by Orangemaster @ 10:34 am

[Photo of children wearing inflatable crowns]

Instead of environmentally unfriendly plastic trinkets, the city of Tilburg will have the honour of welcoming the royal couple this year on King’s Day waving handkerchiefs, if the Textile Museum gets its way.

On 27 April King Willem Alexander and Queen Máxima will visit Tilburg on King’s Day, which is also Wim-Lex’s 50th birthday. The idea is to wave at them using specially designed orange handkerchiefs, echoing the city’s former textile manufacturing glory.

People will be given free embroidered handkerchiefs instead of crap like the environmentally unfriendly plastic crowns seen above. Sure it’s good publicity for the Textile Museum, but then crap like those crowns are sponsored by lottery companies who prey on vulnerable people. And if you visit the museum, they’ll embroider a golden crown on it for you and you can even use them until 11 June to get into the museum for free.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl)

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May 3, 2016

King’s Day was also about collecting urine

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 9:41 am
Urilift

Some 23,000 litres of urine were collected at three locations during King’s Day in Amsterdam this year in order to make phosphate fertiliser. The urinals were placed at the Nassau Festival, Kingsland and in Vondelpark, and the old 1928 Olympic Stadium collected some urine as well. The urine was then brought to a phosphate factory in Amsterdam-West.

By collecting urine in urinals where no additional water is used, the urine stays ‘pure’. The phosphate is needed to produce fertiliser, which is apparently becoming increasingly more difficult to acquire from natural sources, so much so that urine may one day be the only solution.

And so the urine produced after – I’m just guessing here! – the drinking of quite a bit of beer by men is being turned into manure. Phosphate in Amsterdam has been collected from sewage since 2013, enough to fertilise some 10,000 football pitches.

(Link: nos.nl, photo: urilift)

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April 28, 2016

King’s Day 2016 in Amsterdam through the lens of René Louman’s camera

Filed under: Event,Photography by Branko Collin @ 4:58 pm

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Rain and wind disrupted this year’s King’s Day. The rain largely passed by Amsterdam, but it was still cold enough that visitors had to dress warmer than usual.

Amsterdam-based photographer René Louman took to the streets and captured the rainy streets of the day before, the King’s Day Eve concert of the Amsterdam Klezmer Band and the King’s Day festivities in the city. He also has a good comparison of how busy it was last year and how quiet this year.

Telegraaf speculates that the weather kept many people indoors. Last year’s daytime broadcast of the royal visit to Dordrecht drew 2.5 million viewers, this year’s broadcast of King Willem-Alexander’s visit to Zwolle had 3.4 million viewers.

Like every year Orangemaster and I went to the area around Apollolaan in Amsterdam to look for good deals on the nationwide flea market. I managed to score a camera bag for 2 euro that still had a camera in it!

(Photo: René Louman)

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April 27, 2016

Alternative King’s Song by Truus de Groot

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 11:02 am

kings-song-truus-de-grootTo celebrate Willem-Alexander’s inauguration as king of the Netherlands in 2013 a song was commissioned, the King’s Song, which turned out to be quite the disaster. The committee of wise people asked to initiate the festivities decided that everybody and their dog should be in the song and as a result, the song became a hodgepodge of ill-fitting and often downright ungrammatical phrases.

Truus de Groot felt the song was “rather dreary” and chose to write her own version. De Groot, a Dutch experimental musician living in the US, is known for playing the kraakdoos. In the late 1970s she was a member of the Foolsband, which would later become famous under the name Doe Maar.

(Photo: crop of a frame of the video)

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April 26, 2016

Tourists still missing King’s Day due to date change

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 11:06 am

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Three years into the switch from Queen Beatrix to King Willem-Alexander and from 30 April to 27 April (26 April if it’s a Sunday), tourists are apparently still booking holidays for King’s Day three days too late based on crappy intel, and booking agencies aren’t exactly warning them. Why would tourists have any reason to think a national holiday has moved back three days?

I was talking to my best friend in Québec on the phone recently, telling her about how royally excited I get about the flea market that is the Netherlands on King’s Day. I explained the tourists mishaps that keep happening and she said “what kind of country changes the day of a national holiday?” A country that celebrates it on the birthday of their King or Queen, rather than a set date. Canada Day is celebrated on July 1 for the signing of the British North American act in 1867, so the only moving going on on that date is the Province of Québec (follow the link to get the joke, you’ll thank me).

As luck will have it, Wim-Lex just happens to have his birthday close to 30 April, on 27 April, so that was an easy move. However, the date did not move for Queen Beatrix because her birthday is in January, so we’re inconsistently consistent. According to Wikipedia, on Princess Wilhelmina’s accession to the throne in November 1890 the holiday became ‘Koninginnedag’ (‘Queen’s Day’), first celebrated on 31 August 1891. In September 1948, Wilhelmina’s daughter Juliana ascended to the throne and the holiday was moved to Queen Juliana’s birthday, 30 April. The holiday was celebrated on this date from 1949 until 2013.

Moving the holiday wasn’t new, but it hadn’t been moved in a while and moves when it’s easier, a bit like in the Province of Québec.

(Link: www.waarmaarraar.nl)

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