Queens Day, It's an Orange thing!

Unlike any other day, today is Queens Day in the Netherlands. That means little stalls or Marché aux puces everywhere on the streets with junk, hidden vintage bargains, people dressed in Orange and partying. It's a celebration held nationwide in the honour of the Dutch queen, Beatrice every 30th of April. I've an annual tradition of leaving the house early around 9 or 10 O'clock on this bright day, because then you are assured of some good buys waiting for you. I met up with a friend of mine, Amna and we had begun our hunt through a rather empty street filled with junk yet to be taken away. I had stopped to put my shades into my 'sac a dos' and by coincident I'd laid my eyes on a black leather briefcase covered with a layer of dust decaying away next to a pile of old books and a few FM radios. As I couldn't ignore this connoisseurs piece, I decided to buy this for a stunning price. Moving on we walked and walked and wondered were all the stalls and people were. Not long after this illusional thought we had, we were hit by a wave of people, not to mention many waves yet to come. The weather wasn't so bad either (20 degrees). We came to an halt as our hunt couldn't be progressed because of the crowd. We looked around and were stunned to see how many young adolescents were selling typewriters. Probably stolen from their grannies and grandpas, but for nothing as no one was buying them or looking at them besides us.

Eventually after a small hour we were in the city centre where another few waves hit us. I was getting pretty exhausted as the briefcase didn't particularly have a featherweight. I was about to loose my temper and I was close to pushing someone walking in front of me with my heavy briefcase but then I saw the ultimate black leather hand bag for men, which I had been looking for weeks on end, lying peacefully next to a smaller brown leather bag which eventually was bought by Amna after getting over the disappointment that the black bag belonged to me. I was kind enough and offered to share the bag if needed. After three hours we were pretty much dead to the world, especially now that I was carrying three bags instead of two. Did I mention they were all leather bags? We drank some mango smoothie to rehydrate and prepared ourselves for the trip back home. On the way back we were interviewed by some random radio-station which I've had never heard of, about the cheerful day and we saw some nice things which we bought such as, a brand new converse shirt,a pair of pants + shoes and some jewellery. That's what I call bargain-hunting! When I came home highly satisfied, I heard some awful news on the telly of some loony trying to assassinate the Queen and her family with his suzuki, but didn't succeed. He did manage to kill eight people and injured many. To see some footage visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQcB-YrGocM Such an inhumane world we live in! At last it had become a gloomy black day.◆

F.S