April 30th – Queen’s Day is a national holiday here in the Netherlands. It is a celebration for the birthday of the Queen of the Netherlands (Queen Juliana’s birthday). The date has been retained as Queen Beatrix birthday is in January – not good weather for a party in all the streets of the Netherlands. Queen’s Day is also world famous (in the Netherlands?) for the Orange Craze
People wear orange clothing, hats, orange boas and other quite interesting creative orange accessories. The Royal household is the House of Orange so there will be orange banners, orange coloured foods & drinks, orange cards, orange everywhere. So if you will be in the Netherlands on April 30th do bring at the very least your orange t-shirt. If you should forget there will many orange offerings for sale on the street from g-strings, to cowboy hats and everything between. On Queen’s Day there is also a “freemarket” (Dutch: vrijmarkt) all over the country, where everybody is allowed to sell anything they wish in the streets. The streets of Amsterdam are lined with stalls and groundsheets and tables laden with everything and anything that you could imagine for sale somewhere. Children selling toys they have outgrown, people baked cakes and sold them, oranges, orange juice, clothing, books, records, videos, cd’s, tapes, car bits, tv’s, kitchen stuff, jewellery, junk – absolutely anything can be sold on this day.
