Wednesday, January 1, 2020

New Years Eve in the Netherlands

Well, we're back from our trip to Glasgow for Christmas which was wonderful, and I have to say that Kelvingrove park is the best dog park I have ever ever been to, and I already miss it.  It was great to get to hang out with the kids, although youngest could only be there for three days, and the dog got sick for part of it.  We got some lovely walks in as well as touring around Glasgow, though nothing is open over Xmas, so we didn't get to the tenement museum, and the man didn't make it to Govan Church, the coolest thing to see in Glasgow, hands down.

Anyway, we made it back to the Netherlands in time for New Years Eve.  Now we'd heard that the Dutch go over the top with fireworks, and kids have been banging some off for a month now, this was like nothing we'd ever seen before, and the Catalans love fireworks.  This, however, was a whole new level.

The fireworks were going off all evening, fortunately Stella is completely unafraid. Chuck would have been a mess.  And it was pretty loud, but you honestly got used to it.  Then it was midnight.  Allow me to try and describe.  Imagine it is hailing heavily and you are under a canvas tarp, that is the base sound.  Now, at the same time, there are a large number of horses running back and forth over wooden bridges.  In addition, many many people, lets say at least a hundred, are shooting off hunting guns continuously, and added to that, at least once a minute, someone shoots off a cannon, near you. 

And we are in a remote area on a boat, not in a big city.  I cannot imagine what it was like in Amsterdam.  I gather that many people go off to Belgium in the summer to stock up on hundreds of Euros worth of fireworks that have to be stored in a special safe for half a year.  They can only, legally, buy them for three days before new years.  But it seems that lots have an at home store of them.

They are utterly bonkers. Apparently in some parts of the Netherlands, the tradition includes setting cars on fire!  Nice.

The firework litter this morning was impressive. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We watched London's fireworks on TV and celebrations across Canada mc'd by Rick Mercer from Quidi Vidi.

Not a patch on the Netherlands! We actually stayed up until midnight though. SeadogL

oreneta said...

Ohh! Good on you all! I sort of feel like we should have gone out to watch, but we just didn't really want to.