Koninginnedag (Queen's Day)

Yesterday, the 30th of April, myself and seven others from my floor donned our orange apparel and headed to Eindhoven via train to celebrate the last Queen's Day for a while.  Queen's Day is a huge celebration of the Queen's birthday, but this Queen's Day, she abdicated her throne to her son - so next year they will celebrate King's Day on April 27th (his birthday).  Needless to say, just like Carnaval, the Dutch did not disappoint on Queen's Day.  We went to Eindhoven to celebrate - it has the second largest celebration I think (Amsterdam is first).  The entire town shuts down, and the streets are filled with people.  There were stages with music and djs set up all around the town.  The night before is a big celebration as well, but we decided to just celebrate during the day.  I was glad that we went to Eindhoven instead of trying to make it to Amsterdam - Eindhoven was so crowded that I can only imagine how crazy Amsterdam would be!  After just one stop on the train to Eindhoven, there was standing room only - thankfully we were the first stop and had seats!  I felt safe during the entire day - there was plenty of security around as well as anti-riot gates around the train station to manage the huge increase of traffic.  There was a lot of trash everywhere though (people weren't allowed to carry cans or bottles of beverages with them.  there were stands though where you could pour your cans into plastic cups for free.  I thought this was a brilliant idea...except there were not enough trashcans around the stations.  If you wanted to play kick the can or spin the bottle though, there were ample materials. ha).  All in all, Queen's Day was a success!

The lads - Reservoir Dogs style.  My camera has an awesome setting where you can isolate one color, so I picked orange for a lot of the photos!

Orange is the official color of the Netherlands.  On the train - yay for seats!

A whole lot of orange!

Group photo!

THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE.

Posing in front of the masses. (I used the orange setting on this picture!)

In case you want to know more about Queen's Day, here is a short video from NPR.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/04/30/180013890/orange-is-everywhere-as-dutch-welcome-new-king