Thursday, April 27, 2023 — AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands — Mix beer, all manner of boats, blaring music, garish orange, hundreds of thousands of people, endless sidewalk junk sales, and much more beer, and you get King’s Day, or Koningsdag, in Dutch. It’s a national holiday, and it marks the birth of King Willem Alexander, and dates back to 1885. When the Dutch monarch is female, the holiday is known as Koninginnedag, or Queen’s Day.

In either case, it’s one hell of a party. We saw it, felt it, coming as early as the afternoon before, when walking the historic streets in the medieval center of of Utrecht, a college town, where there was a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation, people were staking out places for the sidewalk sales, the beer tents were going up, and the city crews were hurriedly placing pissoirs (urinals) along the canals and streets.

Still, King’s Day was wilder, bigger, louder, than we ever imagined. We came out of the Rijksmuseum, after our long-awaited viewing of the amazing Vermeer collection, into a sea of orange, with tens of thousands of people surging up and down the streets. We made our way to the first of the ring canals and watched the endless flotilla of party boats, blaring music, all packed with people drinking, dancing, and waving flags, a few of them puffing with smoke machines. The whole historic downtown was absolutely jammed with people drinking and watching the boats, and stepping around the yard sale tables set up everywhere on the sidewalks. One little girl was selling her Pokemon cards. We bought a couple ice-cold Heineken beers from a sweet pair of Dutch boys who looked about twelve years old.

The party wasn’t confined to just the downtown, either. The entire tram system was canceled or blocked, more or less, and so we walked the mile or two back to our hotel. All the way home we passed thickets of partiers gathered around bars and tents, dancing and drinking, more sidewalk sales, and drunk guys leaning into the public pissoirs. Even hours later, as young Japanese women in kimonos served us an unforgettable multi-course dinner at our hotel, the Okura, we could hear the faint sounds of the boatloads of King’s Day partiers still floating past on the canal outside.