Our First King's Day!

On last Saturday,  we celebrated our first King's Day (Konigsdag)!  On King's Day, the whole country celebrates.  It is one huge party!  For a little more background on it, check out this link:  http://www.iamsterdam.com/en-GB/experience/kings-day/all-about-kings-day-in-amsterdam

If you are on Facebook, you may have seen my post about Amanda.  Each year, the King visits one or two towns.  This year, he came to the town we live in, Amstelveen!!  The city asked the school for 4th and 5th grade students from 15 countries to participate in the festivities that the King would see on his walk in Amstelveen.  Amanda was lucky enough to be selected (randomly from those that volunteered) to represent the US.

The King and Queen walked right by her and the Queen asked a question to the classmate next to her! Also, the former Queen (gave up the throne to her son last year) said a couple words to Amanda.

 The whole event was televised so Amanda was on Dutch TV as well!  We watched it that night.  Here are a couple screen shots from the TV coverage:

In the second picture, the Queen is in the blue dress and the princesses are in matching dresses.  The King is standing behind the soccer player with the number seven.

Here's another picture taken by Rob Boos from ISA:

After the King's visit was finished, we decided to ride our bicycles to Amsterdam to check out some of the other King's Day festivities.  We rode to Vondelpark.  We went there because we had heard it was known for being a great place to go with kids.  It was so interesting.  People are able to sell just about anything they want that day without paying taxes anywhere in the country.  Vondelpark is where many children try to sell their old toys, books, services, or games.  Kids in the US would love this!  First, it was still crowded when we arrive in the afternoon, and this is not a little park. Some of the interesting things we saw included:

• Tons of garage sale items
• Homemade games you could play to win prizes - including several where you paid a few euros to throw eggs at a person's head!!!  Seems like that would hurt!  Kind of funny to watch though...
• Kids playing their music for tips just like street musicians - so cute...
• People selling all kinds of cookies, drinks, and other treats

The people watching was great!  Most people, including us, were wearing orange.

For the adult crowd, there were parties everywhere in the city as well, many of which required purchased tickets.  There were a ton of people at the Olympic Stadium when we rode by and we walked near some of the canals and the Hard Rock Cafe where plenty of people having a good time as well! 

It was a fun day!