skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Somewhere in a far-out corner of Europe is a shitty little country below sea level. This patch of mud is headed by the house of Van Oranje-Nassau. Their name inspired the national colour: orange.
Queensday in Amsterdam
Twice on even years and once on odd years*, this entire place turns orange. Orange flags, decorative crap, random things painted orange, orage hair spray-paint, orange outfits, orange everything with the occasional red-white-blue thing to break the Orange Ocean. The national dress-up occasions are usually accompanied by vast amounts of beer, dope, puke and random drunken chants.
Queensday in Amsterdam, boatin' around
Queensday in Amsterdam, the "Golden Corner" of the Herengracht
That's why orange is widely accepted as our national colour, relating to the House of Orange and the monarchy. However, the use of the red-white-blue is considered nationalistic and henceforth "not done". Put a Dutch flag on the sleeve of your jacket and you're sure to get a beating by some of the rogue-Xth-generation-immigrants because you're a nazi, neo-fascist, "NSB'er"*, or something else dirty.
Queensday in Amsterdam. This is more of an 'art for art's sake' picture, but it's some rave in a parking garage opposite the Stadhouderskade.
* Once a year, April 30th is Queensday, and every two years a World/European Football Championship
* NSB = Nationaal Socialistische Beweging, the Dutch nazi party in the 30's and 40's
This is some random snippit from the MSW forum, I'm posting it here because it displays what I find funny and most people don't:- I see your point, but I'll be coming disguised as a giant turtle, until I'm convinced it's safe and there are no psychos or murderers among you.
- a good psycho always waits until everyone feels safe and are drinking in the evening then picks em off one by one as they go to bed / toilet,etc. it makes it far easier and more satisfying the other approach is as we say in the psycho trade..doing a columbine
- Sorry, I'm definitely not coming now. You hear about these things in the news. One minute an innocent surfing trip, the next I'm being gang banged by seventeen fat pagan women with swastika tattoos
As you all know, whenever there's something like a World Exhibition, a Football World Championship or Olympics, countries try to go the extra mile when it comes to building their prospective cities of the so-called future.
This is the Estaçaõ do Oriente in Lisboa, Portugal. It was built for the 1998 World Exhibition. Even though I'm no fan of contemporary architecture I like this one.
Couple of weeks ago in Kiev I was again sorta amazed at the Slavic preferences in terms of colours and the general display of flashyness or impersonated wealth. Personally I think this tendency has its roots in the Eastern Orthodox church, as the churches are the worst of all when it comes to the excessive use of gold, bright colours and decorative thingamajigs.Kiev is a cool place however with lots to see and a pack of cigarettes costing only 0.60 euros - even cheaper than Georgia. Hotels are very reasonably priced and mostly up to western standards. Transportation is cheap, beer is cheap, woman are cheap. What else could you possibly want.
How to escape mass tourism? Easy, look for it in the lion's den: the Canary Islands. There isn't a single European holiday destination that gets more charter flights filled with pale British, Dutch and German tourists. Three weeks later they're flown back as the typical bright-red holiday lobsters you see in the streets of Northern Europe during summer. However, it is actually possible to escape the packed discoteques of the all-inclusive holiday resorts.
Last March I went to Lanzarote, the Sodom & Gomorra of western holiday making, and spent a week in a 300-inhabitant village with no ATM, three buses a day and no hotels.Lanzarote is the northernmost of the Canary Islands. Politically part of Spain, geologically part of Afrika. The island is basically divided in two parts: the Southern part is urbanised and filled with hotels and tourists (luckily the Russians haven't found this one yet) while the Northern part is a nature reserve. The law states that there aren't any hotels, resorts, urban developments, discos and the like allowed.The little village of Caleta de Famara has close to nothing, but it does have the Playa the Famara with nice waves and an amazing view. The beach is a bay enclosed by a big rocky mountain on the North side, and open to the Atlantic in a NW direction. Any tourist activity going on completely centers around the playa.
This lead to the development of an illegal-but-tolerated bar, Lenny's, with Amstel on draft the only place to go at night for a beer. When the draft wouldn't pour anymore they switched to Heineken on the bottle. Just as you think you're standing on the edge of the world, you don't have any choice but to drink very ordinary Dutch beer. Damn. I would've settled for that Spanish crap.
About five weeks ago I was in Batumi, Georgia. I hadn't been there for two years, so it was nice to be back.
The semi-Carribean banana republic athmosphere was as always present in the streets of Batumi, complete with palm-trees and other (sub)tropical plants. Bright-coloured colonial houses mixed with run-down, though brightly painted Soviet tenement blocks.
Just replace the second-hand German cars with 1950's oldtimers and you would have Havana on the Black Sea.
