Today was Queensday in the Netherlands. There’s a detailed description on Wikipedia–where else?–but in short, it’s a national holiday celebrating our queen (though it’s held on the birthday of the previous queen for reasons of weather).

It’s funny, because the Dutch pride themselves on being a very practical, level-headed people. We don’t really do the patriotism thing. Three exceptions:

1. Queensday. BREAK OUT THE GIANT ORANGE WIGS.
2. Soccer. BREAK OUT THE FACEPAINT.
3. When we’re criticized. We’ll be all, “Oh, nah, we’re not really that patriotic, we’re way too sober for that,” and then someone goes, “You know, the Netherlands have a real problem with this-and-that” and then this orange haze of pure rage covers our vision and we wake up three hours later asking “WHAT JUST HAPPENED.”

That said, I don’t think Queensday is that much about patriotism, though it looks like it on the surface–there’s flags and facepaint and “I LOVE HOLLAND” shirts. It’s an excuse to… well, here’s how we celebrate it:

• Orange. Just… orange.
• Nationwide garage sales held on the streets. Everything from ten-year-old sunglasses to brand-new clothes to stained My Little Ponies cover every conceivable foot of pavement.
• ORANGE. Jeans and hats and hair dye.
• Getting the day off work. We’re so keen on this, in fact, that if April 30th falls on a Sunday, we’ll move Queensday to April 29th instead.
• Partying. Lots of clubs organize Queensnight parties and the beer consumption is through the freaking roof.
• ORANGE. Flags and socks and shirts and wigs and coats and flowers and and and and…

Because of how busy the Amsterdam city center is, they lock it off from most traffic, trams included. This makes the streets a free-for-all, with tourists, people hawking their wares, drunk partygoers, cyclists, and regular visitors all sharing the streets with taxis and buses.

CHAOS REIGNS.

I did mention the orange, didn't I?

Since today is the official opening to my stepmom’s new restaurant, I headed towards the bus stop, which was already filled with orange-wearing neighbors and tourists waiting for the bus. We dutifully chatted about the weather, which was awesome–after a week of rain, today was T-shirt-and-ice-cream weather, with rain picking up where it left off tomorrow–until the bus drove past without slowing down. The driver threw up his hands in apology. Orange-clad passengers with Dutch flags painted on their cheeks waved at us through the windows.

“To the trams!” we shouted, figuring we’d see where we ended up and walk from there. We kidnapped a handful of confused tourists and marched towards the other bus stop. On the way there, I changed my mind and swerved towards home, where I climbed onto my bike for the fifty-minute ride into town.

Pay special attention to the feet of the girl on the left.

Once arrived, I spent some time at my stepmom’s restaurant, took people’s money when they needed to use the bathrooms, and nibbled on some delicious chicken saté before heading back out to Purchase Junk, as is my duty as a Dutchwoman on Queensday.

JUNK: There was lots of it.

For the record, I bought a) ice cream and b) this cute little spool to wind up the cord for my earphones. VICTORY IS MINE.

Cute spool aside, there are a lot of good reasons to dislike Queensday. Criticize the trash people leave behind. The drunken partygoers screwing things up for everyone else. The noise. The damage caused. Criticize the monarchy, the capitalism, the patriotism… I can go on.

But most of the time, I like Queensday. I like people being in a good mood. I like people enjoying themselves and being completely, utterly ridiculous, wearing huge orange clogs and orange dresses and sparkly tiaras. There’s music on every other street corner, people dancing and laughing and starting conversations with total strangers. The streets are packed with people just out to have a good time. Friends will take their boat out for a boat ride through the canals, just putting on their music and basking in the sun. Entire streets will congregate around single cafes.

On Queensday, the city is one big party, and sometimes, there’s nothing better than wandering around and soaking up the atmosphere.

I’ve been quiet on chat/Twitter/this here blog lately, for two significant reasons: one, I’m lazy; two, the lovely Helen Corcoran decided to grace me with her presence. After spending several days getting up early, feeding her silly, and dragging her all across town, I’m back to sitting around in my PJs and trying desperately to catch up on chores and missed sleep.

I love playing tour guide, but sometimes the line blurs between tourist and tour guide. When I took Helen to see places I’d never visited before, speaking another language, I knew anyone overseeing me would assume I were a tourist. I felt  like a tourist, too: obsessively planning my day, constantly checking the map, thinking of where to eat and which bus to take. One moment, I’d be standing in line for the Anne Frank House and be offered an English flyer; the next, I’d be dragging Helen past the house where I grew up so she could see the old, overgrown graveyard where I used to play as a kid.

Being so immersed in American culture–American friends; American books; American television–has given me a very foreign perspective of the city I grew up in. I see everything in a new light. I appreciate the history, the context. Buildings I passed every day suddenly represent so much more. Food I snacked on as a kid is suddenly unique. Little details–the lights fixed around the bridges, the bike-only tickets for trains–stand out in a way they never did before.

It means I can point out fascinating details to visiting friends, because I know it’ll be special to them, but it also means it’s not as much a part of everyday life as it used to be. The normalcy is gone. It may be a good thing: It makes me appreciate my city more. At the same time, I’m not American, I’m not foreign, I am–or should be–Dutch through and through. There’s a fine line between appreciation and feeling like a tourist in your home town.

When I bike to the supermarket, I’ll catch myself thinking about how smooth and flat the bike paths are, I’ll marvel at how natural biking comes to me, I’ll smile at a mother balancing heavy groceries on the handlebars and two kids perched on the rack. Five years ago, I’d just be cursing myself for not checking if I needed to get milk.

It’s an odd feeling to have, and I’m not sure I like it.

Is it just a part of growing older and looking at things differently? Have you ever felt similarly?

Well, two weeks, at this point. I’m such a slacker.

In lieu of actual blog content, let me show you what I’ve been up to…

… witnessed my dad and stepmom’s new Thai restaurant being blessed by a Buddhist monk. (My stepmom is the lady in blue–my dad’s not in these photos. All the elderly people are family, though. The man setting next to me is my granddad.)

… revised BLINK and sent it back out to betas. Here’s a comparison of different versions of the first few chapters. I… very badly want to be done with this book.

… started “The Tales of Sigma City”–a pulpy ’50s superhero novella–from scratch. This is how I envision my main character, Joan. She needs a hug.

… biked into town so I could work on the above novella in the Central Library. On the way there, I encountered this bike parking boat, which is the coolest thing ever. It is out-Dutched only by our habit of pointing at a significant body of water and going, “That. That right there is where I’m going to build a house.”

(The floating flower market visible in this picture is also high up there, though.)

Poffertjes are soooooo goooooood, you guys. SOGOOD.

Wikipedia describes them thusly:

Poffertjes (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈpɔfərtjəs]) are a traditional Dutch batter treat. Resembling small, fluffy pancakes, they are made with yeast and buckwheat flour. Unlike American pancakes, they have a light, spongey texture. Typically, poffertjes are served with powdered sugar and butter.

Mainly in the colder seasons, temporary stands selling poffertjes are quite popular, and sell portions containing one or two dozen of them. Sometimes the cook prepares them freshly for you. They are sold on a small cardboard (sometimes plastic) plate and come with a small disposable fork the size of a pastry fork. Poffertjes are not difficult to prepare, but a special cast iron pan or copper pan (also available in aluminium with Teflon coating) with several shallow indentations in the bottom is required.

One of the thing I love about staying at my sister’s house is that there’s a poffertjes stand every Saturday, cold weather or no cold weather. Yesterday, I treated myself to some, and thought I’d snap a few pictures to share the experience.*

First: oiling the plate.

Second, squishing the batter into the indentations.

Third, flipping the poffertjes. (They use special forks for this.)

Fourth, you pluck the poffertjes off the plate, add butter and powdered sugar…

And fifth, you eat the damn things. (I’d add a picture but I was too busy eating DELICIOUSLY SWEET POFFERTJES.)

If you ever get a chance to try these–please do so. You won’t be disappointed.

* I tried to be surreptitious about taking pictures… which was tricky. At some point I just blurted out something so people could hear my utter non-accent. I’m sure all inhabitants of major cities are familiar with the “I’m not a tourist! Really!” dance.

In the Netherlands, Christmas is a big deal–but not quite as big as in the US. Often families don’t celebrate it, instead celebrating Sinterklaas, another “hanging out with the family and giving kids presents, also there’s an old bearded dude involved” kind of holiday early December.

Our family did both. /spoiled

Officially, though, we have Christmas Eve and Day on the same days as the US, with an important distinction in that a) when there’s presents, we’ll do them on Christmas Eve instead of the following morning (at least in my family), and b) we have two Christmas days; Second Christmas Day, December 26th, is just as important as First Christmas Day, December 25th. That gives us time to celebrate with both sides of the family.

And get extra presents.

/even more spoiled

In my family we’ve sort of given up on the presents part, since most of the kids in the family are fully grown, but I’ve still got a full enough Christmas planned: tonight, I’m going out to dinner with my paternal grandparents, my dad, his wife, and my mother; tomorrow, I’m going to my mother’s where we’ll brunch with her side of the family; Monday, I’m headed to my mother’s again where the two of us will hang out, watch a movie, and gourmetten, which is similar to raclette but with meat, fish, and vegetables instead of cheese.

Basically, a meal in miniature form. That you cook yourself. On teeny little pans. It is the absolute cutest.

For now, though, it’s Life As Usual, except for:

a) All the Christmas music playing from street organs.

b) The view of a camel from my (well, my sister’s) front door.

I admit, I had to do a double-take on that one.

More tomorrow. For now, if you celebrate, I hope you have an awesome couple of days!

St. Martin’s Day, better known as Sint Maarten here.

Only in recent years did I find out that Sint Maarten is a) celebrated in various countries, albeit in different ways, and b) only celebrated in certain regions of the Netherlands. As a kid, I pretty much assumed the entire country — if not the entire world — celebrated the day.

The Wikipedia entry I linked to above gets a few things right about my own experience with the day: It’s celebrated on the evening of November 11th, and kids go out carrying lanterns and singing songs about Sint Maarten. The most well-known songs go like this:

Sinte sinte Maarten
De koeien hebben staarten
De meisjes hebben rokjes aan
Daar komt sinte Maarten aan!

And:

Elf november is de dag
Dat mijn lichtje, dat mijn lichtje
Elf november is de dag
Dat mijn lichtje branden mag

(Eleven November is the day
That my light, that my light
Eleven November is the day
That my light gets to burn/light)

No one ever accused the Dutch of being song-writing geniuses, all right?

Anyway, the kids go door to door in groups, carrying a lantern each — sometimes home-made, sometimes store-bought. When the door opens, they sing a song or a parody thereof in unison. (Accusations regarding the size of one’s mother are pretty common in those parodies, though those usually only show up when the kids aren’t accompanied by their own parents. Fancy that.)

THEN is when the magic happens — and the part that Wikipedia left out. The owner of the house offers them candy.

This lead to the song I just heard a minute ago:

Twaalf november is de dag
Dat de tandarts, dat de tandarts,
Twaalf november is de dag
Dat de tandarts boren mag

(Twelve November is the day,
That the dentist, that the dentist,
Twelve November is the day,
That the dentist gets to drill)

Aside from parodies — offensive or humorous — kids get inventive with the songs in different ways. I’ve heard rap songs, and just now one kid accompanied the others in his group with his beatboxing.

So there’s your random dose of Dutch culture for the day!

You know that stereotype about the Dutch being greedy?

It’s true. We even double up on Christmas — that’s right, we’ve got two Christmas Days.

We do the same thing to Easter. And Pentecost.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, to be honest. An extra Christmas day is very handy to hit up all sides of the family, but in this country, that’s not exactly a tough job to begin with. Even driving cross-country takes only two hours at most. So why we get an extra day but humungous countries like the US have to make do with one — beats me.

So there’s your random bit of information for the day! I’ll just leave you with this link (which has made its way through the Twitterverse already, so you’ve probably seen already): The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas on Hyperbole and a Half.

I laughed.

A lot.

(And now I’m off to prep Christmas dinner 2.0 further. Ta!)

World-building is one of the skills I’ve always admired in writers who can handle it well. Ranging from creating entirely new worlds to bringing an existing environment to life and anything in-between – if it becomes a real, fleshed out setting that’s a character all its own, you’ll really, really have to mess up with the rest of your book if you want to lose me as a reader. It’s made me hang in there with books like Children of Men, which started slow, but has so many details about the world and people’s reaction to it that I stayed entertained despite it; it’s why I was completely appalled to hear that people have read Watchmen without reading the supplemented materials. (See? You even made the Watchmen Crimebusters all emo.)

No matter how much I love it as a reader, it’s one of those things I can only sigh wistfully at, knowing I likely won’t be able to achieve it as a writer.

Which just makes me want to give it a whirl, and make world-building a priority in my next book.

I pondered current and upcoming projects of mine. The post-apocalyptic sci-fi, I thought, would definitely need a lot of world-building, but that’s a book I won’t be ready to write until at least a year or two from now. Next, it occurred to me I could make LA a much more relevant part of the cosy mystery I’ll be tackling this year, but was somewhat unsure; I have, after all, never actually been to LA.

Unless the plot demands otherwise, my contemporary fantasies are automatically set in the USA to increase the appeal to the US market. Why shoot yourself in the foot if you don’t have to, right? The only problem with that is that I’ve been to the US a grand total of twice, and despite my complete immersion into American pop culture, still do silly things like have my characters pick up mineral water from a gas station or mention them passing job centres. (I’m still wrapping my head around their non-existence in the US.)

Of course, I could always research like hell, visit again – which I intend to – or ask friends of mine for details, as I’m doing with the Wielders scenes set in Chicago. Still, brief visits or second-hand info are sketchy to rely on, and I’m not sure it’d give my book the same immersive feel as Bon Temps in True Blood (forgive me, I haven’t read the books) or Miami in the Dexter series (which I have read, but remains very intertwined with the TV series for me).

So what kind of setting could I use? Something unique to the fantasy genre, that I still know enough about to write authentically?

Oh, right. I’ve lived in this quaint little town called Amsterdam since the second I was born.

And last year, I wrote this funny little book called Always Read the Fae Print which just so happens to be set in Amsterdam.

Honestly, how do I even remember to breathe and feed myself?

All of this is doubles as an elaborate intro to the photos I took on a boat trip last Sunday. I never quite realised just how very Dutch The Netherlands can be at times. Sometimes, I really do love my country.

… even if this last picture quite aptly illustrates why we’re all going to drown within the next 100 years.

Oh, where to start. I’m almost tempted to use bullet points – I will never not love lists – but I’ll be wild and go for narrative, instead.

It is midnight, two minutes into Monday, and I just got back from a Spinvis concert, part of the Kamermuziek tour. I’m still blown away. It’s one of those performances that actually warrants a DVD; instead of going “oh, it was so cool to see him live”, the sight of him doing his thing and the visual additions actually enhance the product.

At the start of each song, he recorded a number of sounds – from guitar riffs to duct tape unrolling – and put them on loop, acting as repetitive background music. This gave the songs an entirely different feel from the studio recordings (or attic recordings, as the case may be). On the stage next to him were three vertical screens, showing images that complemented the song or acted as back-up to the music – recordings of himself or other contributing artists playing a different instrument or singing. It was psychedelic and bizarre and intense, but at the same time, immensely casual and earnest. In the break, I overheard someone say, “Freaky. But, you know, cool.”

Which about sums it up.

He played all my favourite songs, too – Voor Ik Vergeet, In De Staat Van Narcose, Ronnie Gaat Naar Huis and Ik Wil Alleen Maar Zwemmen. I found some low-quality recordings on YouTube that give an idea of the show: Het Voordeel Van Video and Voor Ik Vergeet.

Though I vowed to myself not to buy CDs anymore in an effort to save money and move with the times, I predictably ended up buying one, and and stood in line to have it signed by him after the show. It took ages, but it was worth it – everyone in line was cracking up at the way he personalised everything. Good times.

In an effort to improve upon the night even more, the universe sent me a waiter offering bitterballen – which I’ve been craving for months – and a bus driver kind enough to pull over for me inbetween stops, saving me from a half-hour wait.

On second thought, I think I’ll forego the subject-hopping entirely: it’s late, I have work in the morning, and this turned out to be a decent-sized entry on its own. More later on the end results of Sterren op het Doek.

So there’s your dose of Dutch culture for the month. Enjoy!