King’s Day 2024
The novelty of King’s Day has completely worn off for us by now. Perhaps it wouldn’t have had spending time in crowded places with loud music and drinking was our idea of having a good time, but it’s not. King’s day is observed on 27th April1 and is a public holiday. This year, 27th April happens to fall on Saturday and the Netherlands doesn’t give a compensatory day off in case a national holiday falls on a weekend. So it was just a normal weekend with the occasional snatches of loud music blaring on someone’s boat drifting into our house.
It was quite cold in the morning (was about 9ºC till noon2), and it even rained. We saw several boats filled with people dressed in orange and huddling under umbrellas go past our house. April weather is always bit of a gamble here in Amsterdam.
Last year, the wife had decreed King’s Day as the day when the curtains in the house will be taken down, washed, dried and put back up. So despite the wife fighting a crushing migraine, and me still not being quite there yet after a long flu, that’s what we did today. Sure does make it easy to remember when the curtains were last cleaned.
A bit more about that in the post I had written during the pandemic.↩︎
It was 18.5ºC inside the house. We haven’t felt the need to turn on the heating for many weeks now, but today we turned it on for a bit.↩︎