Queen's day is probably the biggest holiday in the Netherlands where everybody dresses in orange and goes onto the streets. Already on the day before, tremendous parties take place and the famous flea-market starts, filling the streets with vendors and customers. The vrijmarkt allows the selling of items without a permit and without paying tax: so basically everyone is trying to get rid of their unused/used items for a decent/ridiculous price.

So basically what happens is that you have extemely crowded streets with real treasures/heaps of junks on the sidewalks, with crazy people doing crazy things. And there is a small stage on every other corner where people listen to music and drink beer 24/7 (for 24 hours). This year, Queen's day happened to be clear and sunny for 24 hours, for the first time this year, it was a crazy fortunate coincidence, as it hadn't been really warm before (nor afterwards). I actually got a tan, visible on my wrist where the wrist-watch left a paler line. Queen's day has actually erased and overwritten my Maltese wrist-watch-line.

Paradoxically, the actual big party night does not necessarily take place on Queen's Day, as the next day might be a working day and Dutch are nice and don't take a day off just because of a slight hangover. So this year, we partied on the 29th of April, all in orange!

The hat you see on my head has little flashing lights on them, which allow you to glow in orange in the dark (courtesy of my friend Brittany). And this was only one of the incredible amount of orange merchandise you could buy in shops. I'm surprised I didn't see any orange coloured drinks, although they allegedly exist.

Next Dutch event was a bike-tour, aiming to see the tulip fields which are soon to disappear as they are cut off and sold to tourists (I'm not a flower person, but I can't really imagine locals going mad and buying huge bouquets of tulips to take home). 

The biking turned out to be quite a tour, a 37 km route from Heemstede to Leiden, check out our GPS-track on the fancy map! My first real bike-tour ever, and without rain! :)  

Most of the tulips were already cut, so we only covered a small color-scale of the rainbow, ranging from red to yellow.

It made me feel quite dizzy when we were trying to estimate the number of flowers in this field.. Probably millions! Multiply with a few euros per tulip and BAM, you're a millionaire!

Now back to writing my thesis, yuppeee! :)