Another Kind of Birthday Party - Royalty in the Nederland

I had a rather splendid day that was quite outside of the tourist dynamic. It happens that the Netherlands has a royal family headed up by a beloved queen. The entire nation takes a national holiday on her birthday and each city and village celebrates with parades, games, costumes, and the presentation of banners by the traditional guilds. Each year the queen visits a city and a small village for the presentations. Again, I walked with Hans and Yne to the village center, not expecting of the scale that I was to encounter. We found instead thousands of people and all manner of colorful things to photograph. The guild members were in traditional intense costume with brilliant banners and sterling guild shields. There is a very elaborated process in which the banners are presented to the Queen’s representatives in each city and village. The guild structure is a core Dutch tradition dating centuries in which apprentices became skilled craftsmen in their chosen trades and advanced through the guild structure.

I found it most pleasing to be right there with all the locals participating in something that would never show up on a tourist agenda. All the children had their bikes brilliantly decorated with the traditional blue and orange colors of royalty. A fine community marching band played and then marched through town with a children’s pony club following, and then the spectral horde of decorated bikes.

A four-hundred-year old windmill was open and I was able to climb up inside of it and photograph it in some good detail. I still am amazed at the ability of people to build things of such scale and durability without benefit of power tools of any kind. There was a most pleasing volunteer woman attending to the mill and she was quite knowledgeable about the mechanics of it. Hans and Yne didn’t hesitate to climb right up the very steep ladder-like stairs into this mill. I have a sense of Dutch people being strong and confident in many ways. In America this mill would never have been open to the public, fear of liability lawsuits would have kept it closed up tight. The litigation lottery does not exist here.

The afternoon and evening proved quite different and equally unlikely if I had been on a canned tour. After the formal celebration, we went to Margaret’s apartment in Eindhoven at 2 PM to find that she actually lives in a magnificent penthouse overlooking the whole of Eindhoven. From her terraces one could see three of the great Catholic Restoration cathedrals. It would have taken me no time to adapt to living in such a place. We had fine refreshments including luscious nuts and cakes. A heavy rain came up but it did not last long and we then ventured over into the market center, half a kilometer away at most. There were uncounted thousands of people out for the national holiday, most of them seeming to be bent on the high-level consumption of beer. The intensity of life and activity going on was again nothing short of breath-taking. We ventured over to a large flea market by St. Catherine’s and I was able to find a couple of rather splendid CD’s for 1 euro each and a German original print for 2 euros.

We sought refuge from the crowds and noise back in Margaret’s penthouse and had the surreal experience of watching the dense cloud break open at sunset and ignite all the buildings with an intense orange brilliance. The clouds soon followed suit in transmuting through a good portion of the color palette. Hans and Margaret disappeared for a while and reappeared with no less than fifteen containers of a magnificent Indonesian cuisine. I felt like I was having dinner in something from Architectural Digest and I ate entirely too much. We ended up doing a tasting of liqueurs that was splendid, most I had never seen or heard of previously. Margaret is obviously used to a very well-kept life. I am feeling well kept at present myself. For the first time since coming to the Netherlands, I went to bed the same day I got up. Hans did as well.

Eindhoven, The Nederland