By Elisa Novick
I hope you will take a little while to see my photos on Facebook of the places I’ve been traveling to in Europe. I am not a photographer and my camera doesn’t have much of a zoom or an optimal viewfinder, but I do like to record my experiences and the photos illustrate some of what I will say here.
My time in Amsterdam may have been unusual. My first day in Amsterdam was Queen’s Day. On that day Queen Beatrix abdicated and her son Willem-Alexander was crowned King. They call it an inauguration and they never actually placed a crown on his head, but Queen’s Day is now King’s Day. A few days later, the Netherlands celebrated Independence Day (liberation from the Nazis) and Amsterdam won a soccer championship. So for several days that week, the streets and bars were filled with singing, cheering people.
As a result, what I saw was a city where people were out in the streets partying, wearing orange, crowding the canals with creatively decorated boats of every size and condition, walking along the streets in happy groups, some carrying various shaped containers of beer (illegal to do in the U.S.), singing and dancing with loud ‘house’ music blaring from speakers everywhere.
I have never been in Washington, D.C., for an inauguration and only have seen English royal events on television, so I have no basis for comparison between countries, but I have to say that I’ve never experienced a city in which it seemed the entire populace was out in the streets in celebration.
I have never identified myself as a proud citizen of the United States, though I’ve counted my blessings that I have not experienced the worst of what the U.S. has on offer nowadays nor of dire conditions anywhere else in the world. Having never experienced the thrill of patriotic sentiment, and knowing what I know about those who run the planet, what I saw in Amsterdam was astounding.
On the other hand, I did, as a child, have fantasies of being a princess and wished I had a beautiful pink and white dress that looked like a birthday cake — Cinderella at the Ball. I felt myself caught between curiosity and judgment at the pomp and pageantry this class puts on for itself, and the split personalities they display, and a strange admiration for the fairy-tale like innocence of the “royal subjects” crowding the streets and strolling through the lovely parks dressed in orange.