King's Day (Koningsdag) in the Netherlands. Happily spent in Utrecht, in my case, because Amsterdam is not really among my favourite places in the country and it's definitely not a good choice in that one day a year when everybody is expected to be drunk and the quantity of ''everybody" is expected to double.
Everywhere you look, there's something orange, someone drunk, something cheap, and someone stoned. The flea market is half the size of the city and they're selling everything you could possibly imagine, from 15-years-old boxes of tampons to plastic bags filled with monkey breath. If they don't manage to get rid of all the items they brought for sale, people just leave them there at the end, for others to take them for free from the street. Other than that, there's a lot of beer, a lot of people who look as if they've been drinking a lot of beer, a lot of empty beer cans to row through if you decide to take the boat for a canal cruise, a lot of good music played in every street corner, and that strong smell of happiness that fills the Netherlands on a daily basis.
