Amsterdam, Netherlands

On Monday evening, the evening after Queen's Night and Queen's Day, the city was an absolute mess. I can imagine that, if you are a tourist arriving in Amsterdam in the evening of 30 April and not knowing what went on during the day, the city must seem like an absolute shock. I wouldn't be surprised if, in that case, you'd feel the urge to immediately return to the airport and fly as far away from the Low Countries as possible.

But, the city cleaners start doing their work as soon as most party-goers are on their way to their home towns again, and they clean throughout the night. Yesterday, the day after, there was still a lot of rubbish left in some streets, but today, as I cycled to the pool in the early morning, the streets were cleaner still and the city started to look like its old self again. Even the rubbish that floats in the canals gets removed when the canals are flushed out every night. There was one exception to that though, because the canal in front of my place is blocked because of reconstruction work. That means that, even though the rest of the canals get flushed through, the one close to me, Oudezijds Achterburgwal doesn't. And the rubbish in it is going nowhere fast. As you can see in the picture above, which I took as I was nearly home after work. The canal, by the way, is much older than the date on this wall. It's Amsterdam's second oldest canal and was constructed in 1367.

Amsterdam, Netherlands

So, the day after Queen's Day turned out to be a rather normal day again. Gone was the orange everywhere, gone was most of the rubbish in the streets (most, though definitely not all) and back was office life. Most European countries have a public holiday today (Labour Day) but not so the Netherlands. We were back at work...

The most exciting part of the day turned out to be the evening when Hanno and I went to a theatre very close-by. The theater is called Engelenbak (roughly translated as box of angels) and every Tuesday they organise an Open Bak (yes, open box) evening. The purpose of Open Bak is to give performers a chance to show their material to a small audience (about 50 people), to try the effect of jokes, to see if their songs are understood properly, to check the engagement of the audience with whatever is performed on stage.

Each Open Bak has about 6 segments of about 10 minutes each, and the performers of each segment are introduced by a more or less well known artist (tonight it was a well-known Dutch stand-up comedian called Lebbis) who also does an introduction and an after-talk. Because you never know what you're going to get, and because of the variation in the performances (tonight included a French chanson-team, an acrobatic team, a singer and a stand-up comedian for example), attending the Open Bak really is a lot of fun. Hanno and I did this regularly ages ago, but this was the first time in years we were back at Open Bak. I think it's a tradition we should be starting again!

The other exciting this was what you see in the picture above: asparagus! White asparagus to be more accurate. I love them, and this is the season for them, plus they are low-carb as well. So many reason to enjoy them with my dinner tonight!