Tuesday is Queens Day (koninginnedag), one of the Netherlands’ most important national holidays. People will flood the streets of every city in the country, dressed in orange, all in celebration of the Queen’s Mother.

The celebrations will actually begin on the night of the 29^th—with public concerts and street parties. In many cases, especially in Amsterdam, these parties will last until the sun rises and the real Queen’s Day festivities begin! After all, nobody has to work today (other than those who choose to hawk their wares—more on this later—and schools are all closed).

We have gathered a few bits of knowledge to help you blend in with your Dutch neighbors on this exciting day.

8 Tidbits for Understanding Queen’s Day

1. See all of those people selling things? That’s because Queen’s Day is the only day of the year that vendors without licenses can sell products on the street.
2. That song you keep hearing? It is called “Het Wilhelmus”, and it is a poem that was written in 1574 about the life of William of Orange and his fight for the Dutch people, in a first-person narrative as though he is introducing himself to the people. Radios are playing it, people are singing it…and you should be too.
3. Those people everyone is waving at? That’s the royal family…you should wave too.
4. You may not be able to count on the store you want being open, but public transportation will be. Use it. Around large gatherings though, routes may be altered, so make sure you check ahead of time.
5. Don’t worry too much about crime, but watch your pockets and don’t cringe too bad if you see someone peeing in public.
6. Why is everyone wearing orange? Because the royal family is named “House of Orange Nassau.” In honor of them, you should wear orange too.
7. And what are they drinking? That’s most likely oranje bitter, a strong alcoholic drink made by soaking the peel of bitter oranges in gin. You’ll probably see plenty of orange cakes and other orange foods as well.
8. Why is the celebration today? Good question, and kind of a convoluted one. In case you want to impress your non-Dutch friends, see this link for the story.

On August 31, 1880, Princess Wilhelmina was born in The Hague. She was the last child of King William III and the only child to outlive him. On August 31, 1885, and on the same date each year after that public birthday celebrations were held for her. The occasion was originally known as Princesses Day (Prinsessedag) and became known as Queen’s Day in 1890 after Wilhelmina became Queen following the death of her father. On August 31, 1902, people in the Netherlands heard that Queen Wilhelmina had recovered from typhus and Queen’s Day became a true public celebration.

On September 6, 1948, Wilhelmina’s daughter, Juliana became queen and from 1949, the Queen’s Day celebrations were moved to April 30, her birthday. On April 30, 1980, Beatrix, Juliana’s daughter, became queen. Her birthday is on January 31, but the date of Queen’s Day remained the same as a way of honoring Juliana. Hence, Queen’s Day is the Queen’s official birthday and the anniversary of her coronation.

Got all that?

1) They are better looking than you: Tall and blond, short and brunette…doesn’t matter. People here are presentable.

2) And yet they are humble about it: Gloating just isn’t a big part of the culture.

3) They are confident and assertive: The concept of I-can-do-anything-if-I-work-for-it is understood here from an early age. But as per #2, they aren’t cocky about it.

4) They ride their bikes everywhere: There are 10,000km of bike lanes here, in a country the size of a thumb tack on the map. This means that basically every single street in the country has bike lanes, on both sides!

5) So they are probably fitter than you: Cycling tends to have that effect.

6) They are more tolerant than you: Nobody cares if you’re gay. Or you smoke marijuana. Or you’re “ethnic”. Just do you.

7) They understand moderation more than you do: People love to drink here. They just don’t drink to the point that they are stumbling all over themselves.

8) They understand other cultures better than you do: You can drive to about five different countries, which speak different languages, in less time than it takes you to share this post with all of your friends.

9) They like flowers: Yes, ladies. Flowers are dirt cheap here. He has no excuse not to show up at your door with a colorful and fragrant bouquet of tulips.

Intrinsically linked to the windmill as a peanut butter is to jelly, the tulip has long been a staple of the Dutch landscape, and subsequently, of Dutch culture. Farmers here produce approximately nine million of them each year, and given how many of the bright yellow and red bulbs you’ll see lining the window boxes of any stroll through the streets here, they sell most of them locally.

While this is the case today, it wasn’t always—a single bulb once sold for today’s equivalent of seven thousand dollars. Yes, that’s 10,000 florins, which was about the same as seven grand today.

See, tulips were once considered quite an exotic treasure, and one not native to the Netherlands. They first came from present-day Turkey in the 16^th-century, when Ottoman merchants brought them. The struggled in the chilly, damp climate, until a Flemish botanist named Carolus Clusius discovered a few tricks to help the tulips prosper here.

They immediately became a status symbol, with only the wealthiest Dutch able to afford them. Businessmen began speculating on the prices of tulips, which altered greatly depending on the quality of a season’s crop, and this mania both made and broke people’s fortunes and livelihoods. The flower gambling bubble eventually burst, like real estate in many places today, and at the same time the Dutch discovered the beauty of other alternatives to the tulips. The market for daffodils, gladioli, hyacinths and irises was born, and the prices for tulips fell to reasonable levels.

The Dutch Flower Market has Diversified

Imagine some of those perfect contradictions that make this world a better place—sweet and sour, fire and ice, kick and snare—the possibilities are endless.

Now imagine an actual city that works that way. That city is Amsterdam. The perfect contrast of order and disorder, organization and discord, beauty and dirt, righteousness and sin—Amsterdamers are not easy to classify.

To the uneducated outsider, one may easily mistake the Dutch for being incredibly laid back, grungy, and perhaps even a little wild. After all, this is the country known outside of its borders for marijuana and open-window prostitution. But spend 10 minutes talking to a local, and you’ll quickly see that your preconceptions couldn’t be further from the truth.

Here are your 12 tips to help you make sure you can fit in here in the Netherlands:

1. Be direct. Beating around the bush is not typically a part of communication here.
2. Respect everyone’s opinion—no matter what someone’s title or place on the hierarchy, everyone’s voice gets heard here.
3. Along these same lines, decisions are typically made in the spirit of group consensus.
4. In light of that, get rid of that idea that these are liberal people. Conservatism runs deep in many aspects of the culture here, and change is slow to come by.
5. They probably know more about your culture than you do about theirs. And they definitely speak your language better than you speak theirs.
6. Don’t be pretentious. It won’t make you friends here.
7. Of course the Dutch have a sense of humor, but refrain from trying out your new material in a business meeting.
8. You may be used to going to happy hour with your colleagues after work. They are not. There is actually a fairly strong separation between work and personal life.
9. You may be proud of your education, and that’s great. But they are probably just as educated as you.
10. If you are going to work here, don’t plan to hop jobs as one may do elsewhere. Continuing the theme of conservatism and slow change, Dutch workers tend to maintain loyalty to one company for a long time.
11. As such, employers are loyal to employees—Dutch labor laws make it difficult for them to get rid of unwanted workers.
12. Don’t let the conservatism intimidate you—it is common to address colleagues informally, by first name.

Now you’re all set to navigate a social or business situation in the Netherlands like a local!

If some of the Netherlands’ more conservative civic leaders had their say, marijuana would no longer be available to visitors in this country. Tired of Amsterdam’s longstanding brand association with marijuana since it was decriminalized in the 1970s, last year, the government introduced a mandatory membership card which would be required to purchase the drug—a card that would only be available to Dutch citizens.

Fortunately for those of you saddened by this news, cooler heads have prevailed, as the law was repealed just before its scheduled introduction on January 1^st. Instead, each city in the Netherlands will be able to regulate marijuana as they choose.

Credit people like Amsterdam mayor Eberhard van der Laan for letting common sense and foresight trump conservative politics:

“It’s not like tourists are going to say ‘OK, there’s no cannabis here anymore,” and accept it, van der Laan said. “Instead, they’re just goingt o try to find it on the streets, leading to a larger black market, more disputes with dealers, no control over its quality and all of the other problems we used to have.”

Of course there is an economic play as well. According to Amsterdam’s Bureau for Tourism, about 25 percent of the city’s 6 million annual foreign visitors visit one of the country’s 750 coffeeshops (220 in Amsterdam alone) to experiment. They estimated that the law would have deterred about 1 million of these from even including Amsterdam in their travel plans.

Whatever the ultimate motivation behind the repeal—be it common sense or euro stacks—it is great to see Amsterdam’s cannabis tradition remain alive and well.

Amsterdam.

If my fascination with Japan is based on the, well, contradictions, it’s safe to say that my fascination with The Netherlands is based on, well…contradictions.  When I first arrived in Amsterdam as a wide-eyed 22-year old, just 4 days into my first foray overseas, I was shocked and uncomfortable with the overall grunge and grit found around every corner.  By the time I got on the Deutsche Bahn train at Centraal Station headed for Koln, I truly believed that everyone in Amsterdam was dirty, high and paying for sex on a daily basis.

Left with this sour first impression, I was surprised when the next year I found myself working amidst Dutch people for the first time, and found them to be among the most business-focused, precise and organized people I had ever encountered.  Now having perception of the Dutch spanning two opposite extremes, by the time I returned to Holland a few years later, I found it to be a completely fascinating and different place.  In reality, it was comprised of the same grunge, the same 300-some “Coffeshops” that could legally sell up to five grams of soft drugs to each customer, and the same scantily-clad Eastern European (and other) women on display in the Red Light District.  The difference, of course, was in my own mentality.

Amsterdam is a breeding grounds for individuality, where strange and different is not merely tolerated, it is embraced.  Which pretty much makes the term “strange” irrelevant around here.  Quite simply, nothing is strange, rather…everything just is.  This can surely come as a shock at first to people raised on a particular set of ideals, norms and visions, but will always prove to be a lively and passionate breath of fresh air the moment one proves capable of breaking the shackles of “norms” and whets their palette for any adventure that may be lurking around the corner…

My ID:  7:46am, Monday, 03 June 2002:  Schiphol Airport

EasyJet flight EZY862 from Edinburgh

The first thing I noticed as my EasyJet flight from Edinburgh began its approach into Schiphol Airport was the sheer mass of the Port of Rotterdam, one of the world’s biggest and busiest container ports.  Having always been interested in transportation and logistics, I imagined where each of the containers below—just orange and blue specks—had been a few weeks earlier and would be in another few weeks.  A few minutes later I was walking through cavernous Schiphol trying to figure out how to get to Amsterdam, where I would first set foot around 8:30 on a lazy Tuesday morning.

After arriving at Centraal Station, I made a beeline for the most fascinating and surreal target on my list—the Red Light District!  I remember being shocked that some of the girls were “open for business” at all, being about the least social time of the entire week.  I didn’t have the best feeling, based primarily on my romantically idealized preconceived notions heading in, and I made haste to see target No. 2—Anne Frank’s House.