Why I Love Queen's Day

It's been 2.5 years (whoa!) since I moved from Amsterdam to Hong Kong, but I've managed to go back 3x already, twice during Queen's Day if we count this current trip. What can I say, I miss the Netherlands big time and will jump at any opportunity to revisit my second home, ESPECIALLY when it coincides with what is arguably one of the world's biggest and best parties - QUEEN'S DAY, aka Koninginnedag (forget Will & Kate)!

For those unfamiliar with Queen's Day, it's basically the Dutch's national holiday every year on 30-April where everyone dresses in orange and floods into Amsterdam for an all-out street party. Before you dismiss it as JASP or 'just another street party,' here's what makes Q-Day so freakin' awesome:

DJs
Fans of house, electronica and trance music like me always have trouble deciding where to party on Queen's Night & Day, because the all of the world's top DJs including Armin van Buuren, Tiesto, Chuckie, Sander van Doorn and more will be spinning in various squares and open areas around Amsterdam, all for FREE!

Crazy Boat Parties
On Queen's Day, the canals are flooded with party boats that are blasting dance music and full of happy, drunk and dancing people. The boats are privately hired and cruise around Amsterdam all day long, allowing the party animals to hop on and off as they please (usually for pee breaks)!

Flea Markets Everywhere
Queen's Day is the only day of the year when the Dutch don't need a license to sell stuff on the streets, so anyone can set up shop as long as you mark your territory in tape at least a full week ahead. That means the streets are literally lined with everything from kids to seniors putting on dance shows, carnival games and selling home-baked goods, drinks, old clothing, books, and I've even been tried selling my crap on Q-Day twice! Hardly made any money, but it was fun while it lasted...

Turning Orange
As mentioned earlier, the colour to wear is orange and that means anything and everything orange you can get your hands on, including hats, scarves, shirts, pants, socks, wigs, etc. Of course, the more unique your item is, the more nods, attention and RESPECT you'll get compared to everyone else, so definitely try to stand out with your orange picks!

Oops, this is starting to sound like PR copy, so I'd better stop!! If you ever get a chance to visit Amsterdam during Queen's Day, be sure to do so. But now...it's time for me to go and get out there in all my oranginess!

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Blogstipation

Wow...so this is what happens when you don’t blog for a long time. You get a million ideas piled up in your wrinkly brain, only to have them hardened into a rock hard turd that’s near impossible to squeeze out when you finally have time to sit down.

I guess that’s the ‘shitty’ part about being a full-time writer. During the day, we write so much that it becomes a chore to write even more at night (especially when most nights are used for writing whatever we couldn’t finish during the day), so we end up losing any motivation to sit in front of a computer screen at all.

Even so, I won’t and don’t wanna give up. Hopefully, there’s some kind of ex-lax remedy for my case of blogstipation, or at some point, I’ll just painfully explode with a gazillion ideas spilling out of me. Until then, stay tuned for more uninspired bits of writing...

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A face only a mother could love

Sometimes, you come across people so beautiful you can't help yourself from staring. Other times, you come across people so ugly...you just wanna punch them out.

WHAT? Yea, I said it. Some people are so ugly, they just trigger the whack-a-mole reaction in me, whereby I gasp in horror every time they pop up and all I wanna do is clobber it back into its sad little hole with my giant stuffed hammer.

I believe there's a term for this in Cantonese called 'yeung seui', which literally means 'ugly in appearance'. I've tried to translate it into English before but never quite managed, since 'fugly', 'repulsive' or 'disgusting' just doesn't warrant a physical beating like 'yeung seui' does. Or is it just me who defines 'yeung seui' as 'so damn ugly you just wanna punch him/her out'?

As an example, I came across a very 'yeung seui' guy in the MTR the other day. He was sitting across me looking like a zombie with his lower jaw jutted out and mouth hanging open to catch any flies passing by, I presume. His eyes were rolled into the back of his head, yet he still managed to stare at everyone around him for uncomfortably long periods of time, all the while giving a 'I want to eat your brains' look to us all.

Like a train wreck, I tried to look away but found my eyes drifting back to him magnetically against my will, getting more and more annoyed with the way he looked, and why did he have to keep staring at me?! Even though it was days ago, the image of him was emblazoned into my head, so I just had to draw him out:

...now isn't that a face you just wanna punch out!? 

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