Queensday is quite a celibration for us Dutchies and for those who aren't Dutch, first a little history lesson:
Willem van Oranje was the leader of the resistance and initiator of the 80-year war from 1568 till 1648 (yes, it took them a while...) to let Holland (than called the Northern Netherlands) become independent from the Southern Netherlands who were still ruled by the Spanish. 'Oranje' means 'orange' and that color became our national color for the royal family and nation in total. Hopefully we'll see a lot of Orange during the Worldcup in South Africa...! So far the color orange and Willem...
Queensday: celibrating the birthday of our queen, currently Beatrix. Her actual birthday is the 31st of January, but as a tribute to her mother (queen Juliana) she fixed queensday at the 30th of April. Queensday is all about unity of the Dutch, we dress up in orange and around the county there are various festivities, freemarkets all over (everybody is allowed to sell their merchandise in the streets, populair amongst kids to get some extra allowance...) and every city has open air concerts and classic old street games.
Queensnight: as queensday is a national holiday, the night before we Dutchies usualy go out and party our ass off. Of course, just in the name of the queen ;-). So the orange dressed crowd will get in their party-mode and the 'Oranjegekte' (Orange madness) is a fact. People having fun, partying and dancing all night and creating unity throughout the people.
So what does a Dutchie like me do when he's not in Holland to celibrate? We'll I was two hours away from the Dutch Ambassy in Managua, so I hopped in the bus with some Dutch girls I met in Léon and we went to the ambassy dressed in Orange. At the entrance we noticed that the dresscode was 'formal', just a little bit different than ours: jeans, skirts and t-shirts... But as the basic principal of the celibration was 'unity' we had no problems to crash the party and we mingled the crowd.
The set-up was nice: free drinks and free food, mostly typical Dutch. Drinks: beer (Heineken) & 'oranjebitter' (orange colored vodka). Food: 'bitterballen', 'cheese', 'haring', and I spotted the 'saté' which is not Dutch but a certain (black) spot in our history we did colonize current Indonesia (at that time the Dutch East Indies) so it made kind of sense...
So after hitting the free food (Dutchies love the free stuff in general and ar usually not afraid of skipping the line to get some more...) it was time to get as much of the free beer there was and we started to have a lot of fun and managed to get a little taste of the 'oaranjegekte' from back home. The official party ended at 10pm and untill than the music was just general background (disappointing!). But than we discharged the dj and hooked up an Ipod filled with typical Dutch music: André Hazes, Van Dik Hout and Guus Meeuwes. Definitely not my favorits, but with a shitload of beers and a great vibe the party was finally kicking! The music definitely scared off all the non-dutch people, but they got a 'weird' spectical in return: Dutchies shouting their lungs out and doing the 'polonaise'. Just google it to see what thats all about.'
So crashing the Dutch Ambassy's Party ended up being a pretty good idea and we partied on untill almost 12pm before they threw us out (us of course grabbing the last cold beers from the fridge) and we needed to get get back to Léon (95km). We found a taxi for a flat rate of $50 and headed back: Good Times!!!
