Queensday

30th of April - Queensday. It is the birthday celebration not as you would expect of current Queen Beatrix but of her mother Juliana who was Queen from 1948 till 1980. People are carrying orange rather than the colours of the Dutch flag. It's the same orange well known of football jerseys. Especially in Amsterdam it's just one gigantic party and one can enjoy people in all kinds of dresses one being more crazy than the other. There is a Queen who knows how to party!

Queensnight, the evening before Queensday, bands are playing all over town and masses of people are inhabiting the streets of Amsterdam. Queensday morning the whole city is transformed into a fleemarket. Its allowed for anyone to do buisiness that day so it's a good opportunity for a crazy purchase. In the evening the parties of the previous night are restarted. Before Holland returns to complete normality.

My city of residence shows a certain ignorance towards Queensday, as do they show it to almost all Dutch holidays, therefore we left for Amsterdam and went nuts there. It was an awesome experience comparable with Berlin Carneval of Cultures or Christopher Street Day. It had a slight touch of Carneval but the music was significantly better.

LONDON

London, a small city somewhere in Europe. Europeans claim it's big, people from Shanghai laugh about them. Nobody laughs about the prices. In 2000 (UK National Statistics) :

• overall prices in London were 6.8% higher than the UK average
• goods tend to be only 2.6% more expensive but services are 13.0% more expensive
• housing was 53% percent more expensive than in the total UK (and 74% if one excluded London from this calculation)

The good news:

• local passenger transport by bus was 28.8% cheaper
• sewerage collection was 19.6% cheaper
  

So though in London you have to live under a bridge and work your a** off and still will not be able to afford a hair cut service, you can at least drive around by bus and use the toilet as much as you want. In relation to the rest of the world London ranked No.5 on the globe. Top 10 most expensive cities are
1.Moscow
2.Seoul
3.Tokyo
4.Hong Kong
5.London
6.Osaka
7.Geneva
8.Copenhagen
9.Zurich
10.Oslo, New York (tied)Nevertheless I dropped by that awesome city the other day to meet a friend who was living in Hong Kong (No.4) at that moment. Guess who?
=No, its the girl to the right. The girl to the left can laugh at small London with its few people.