Saturday, April 30

Another beautiful day!

The view from across the street from our room at the Die Port van Cleve.

Today, April 30, is the Queen's birthday.

This is a national holiday.

It is basically a big street party.

This isn't really Queen Beatrix's birthday.  It is a thinnly vailed excuse to have a  big party.

As described in one of the tourist magazines in our hotel room, it is the Fourth of July, Oktoberfest and a flea market all blended together.  The city center of Amsterdam is blocked off.  No trolleys operate.  No city busses, no public transportation, no private vehicles.  The entire center of the city becomes a pedestrian zone.  The city center is probably a 4 square mile area, 2 miles x 2 miles.  The flea market is open to everyone.  It seems like people sold just about everything from used clothes to cheap sun glasses to pairs of new shoes for 2 Euros and orange wigs.

Below is a picture of an Incan street band.  There were performers all over the city.  In the big city park, Vondel Park, they had a huge concert.  We didn't know who was performing but it was definitely geared to a younger crowd.  From what we could figure out, it wasn't like Summerfest with different venues and different types of music.  Here it was whatever someone put together.  Many cafes and bars had DJs on stages in the street in front of the establishment.  

A big part of the Queen's Day was having a lot of boats, basically anything that could float, filled with party going people, just cruising up and down the canals.  This went on all day long from early morning to dark.  The boats would play music and the people would toss things back and forth between boats. 

 People would line the sides of the canals and the bridges over the canals to watch the impromptu parade of boats.

 It didn't matter which canal we were walking along, there was a continuous line of boats.

As any good street party, there was lots of street food.  The street food definitely had an international flair.  We started with a stop at a bakery.  Mary chose a chocolate croissant.

We escaped the shoulder to shoulder crowds by visiting the Rijksmuseum.

We also discovered our first patch of tulips in front of the Rijksmuseum.

We rented audio guides and toured the museum. This is the "Milk Maid" by Vermeer.

 The "Milk Maid" has become the iconic painting for the Rijksmuseum.  Probably the best known painting we saw was Rembrandt's "Night Watch."

After touring the Rijksmuseum we picked up some orange feathers that had fallen off someone's orange feather boa.  I stuck some in my hat and Mary put her's on the cuff's of her slevees.

This is a picture of the Central Station.  It is the main train station for the city center of Amsterdam.

We ate dinner at a traditional Dutch restaurant. 

Mary had chicken soup and I had beef stew with mashed potatoes.

Tomorrow, we plan to visit the Keukenhof Gardens before we board the ship.