Palenque

My B&B was also very close to St Bavo's! I'll have to look up Stempels when i return next year, hopefully to Haarlem, which i use as a base and pay only 32 euros for a nice B&B with huge breakfast in a quiet, normally, part of town.

Betsy

Um Palenque, would you consider giving us the name of your B&B? Though it's not near St. Bavo, is it the same one as spaarne uses?

BTW spaarne, I thought of you as we walked along your user name river. We walked over the white draw bridge, out to the windmill and back.

We wanted to have dinner at Spaarne 66 tonight, but it was closed all day. We ended up at Dijkers, which was pretty good.

Note: The phrase in my post above should read "its in-house gelateria" (built right into the side of the church).

hetismij

Our town's party is taking place over a Km from my house and I can hear the "music" from here - through double glazed windows. If I move to another room in the house I can hear the party in the next town over too.

Fireworks due in 10 minutes and everything must be quiet by midnight - in theory at least.

spaarne

Breaking news! This just in from my friend Paula in Haarlem:
<i>
Haarlem, 30 April 2010

Well, it was a cold Queens day! It started with a drizzle. The sun came out in the afternoon but the wind was not that pleasant.
When I started working this morning at 8, I noticed already a lot of people sitting and waiting for the first buyers. Brrrr!!

Yesterday was so nice and warm! I even bought some plants for the yard and cleaned up there a bit. I noticed that there are a lot of salamanders in the pond!! Now that it gets warmer there seems to be a boom of those creatures!

John and I went downtown at about 14.30 when the sun was shining and it was way more pleasant to be outside. Haarlem gets a more and more interesting Queensday with music, beer and a lot of frei markt stuff. Not as exciting as Amsterdam of course but more relaxed and less crowded. And beside, some as###les messed up the train schedules going to Amsterdam by misusing the emergency brakes of some incoming and outgoing trains. That meant that there was no train traffic for hours because people climbed out of the train and walked on the tracks to get to Amsterdam CS. So the NS had to close down all the train traffic to prevent people from being hit by a train. Next year one hundred of mongols will misuse the brakes, that's FUN you know, and people will stop going to Amsterdam for Queensday. That are the Dutchies!
We had some beers in the center of Haarlem. I bought some books and a skirt I couldn't live without </i>

This is bizarre. I think I'll retire to Haarlem for future Queen's Days. They do it pretty good there, as demonstrated in the last photo of my series.

Betsy,
That bridge is named the Gravestenenbrug. I lived right in front of it in the ground floor apartment of Spaarne 2. I think that this bridge, petite as it is, is more scenic than the more famous and photographed Magerebrug, "Skinny Bridge" in Amsterdam.

Don't forget the Tyler's Museum and the Frans Hals Museum. Walk through the RLD. It is very mild compared to Amsterdam.

hetismij,
Don't you just love it? Think, you have to wait 364 days for this to come again. The Dutch are so stressed that they need this day to blow off some steam.

Palenque,
See you on the Grote Markt, Q Day 2011? Do you live in the state between the waters?

wildcow

Talking about Queen's Day: this is really funny: a top 10 of junk bought at the flea market-madness across the Netherlands:

http://www.dutchimage.nl/fotoweb/htm...choftheday.fwx

The newsletters of Dutch Image are recommended for foreigners in Holland by the way. It's nice to learn a thing or two about those weird dutch fooks.