The crisis of the vacation countries ....

It is hard to believe but the economic crisis is back. In spite of a huge rescue package for Greece, the confidence in the financial markets is gone. Today is the third day in a row that the bottom seems to be falling out of the world stock markets. And once again it is all about trust. Do we trust the Greeks to pay back the huge package? Can we trust the fickle European government to vote in favor of the disbursements? Will international investors trust the Mediterranean government sufficiently to buy their future bonds? Can the battered banks absorb the potential losses from the Greek, Portuguese, and god forbid, eventual Spanish fall out? Will investors continue to support the banks given their direct and indirect exposure to the toppling vacation countries?

What should one feel about the rescue package? What is the right sentiment to hold: irony, pity, frustration, sympathy, compassion? In my mind’s eye I see that rather fat sweaty hotel owner in Mykonos that probably pays no taxes. Frustration! I see those brown muscled bodies of the Greek boys spending their summers weekend and August holidays on Elia beach. Irony! I remember those confident Greek boys that I met a couple of years ago all starting their own small trading companies in Thessaloniki and Athens. Compassion! Greece and its blue waters is in our mind’s eye one big vacation land, filled with joy and freedom. It all seems so ironically removed from the lack of discipline and years of corruption and overindulgence that the austerity package implies. One cannot imagine the hardship and the years of austerity and the possible bankruptcies that it implies for the people that we meet every odd year on our blue sky holidays. I cannot imagine how one keeps your boat afloat in an ebbing tide of this magnitude. How do you grow your company with hardly any available financing? How do you start a company if the value of your first house hardly covers the mortgage? Sympathy!

On a much happier note, April and May is national holiday season in the Netherlands. On top of the more usual Ascension Day and Pentecost, the official birthday of the Dutch Queen is celebrated on 30 April and once in 5 years the Liberation of the Netherlands from the Germans is a national holiday on 5 May. Wow, great fun!

Last Friday was Queens Day. Nowhere is it celebrated with such exuberance as here in Amsterdam. Around a million people pour into the streets of Amsterdam, creating what borders onto sweet chaos. In no other country is anything remotely like it possible. Nearly everyone dresses up in bright orange. The Prinsengracht gets clogged up with boats of all shapes and sized, filled to near sinking by revelers. Every street corner gets its own DJ and the different drum beats roll over each other in a strange nearly discordant mix. What stuck me this time round was the way in which every group has his or her specific corner. We weaved our way around town, and in front of every canal or DJ booth the crowd as just ever so slightly different. The sunglasses, my-mom-and-dad-is-rich, one-day-I-will-live-in ’t Gooi, crowd gathered on the Amstelveld. The music was lightly techno and modern and they frowned at you if you dared to push your way around. The hard-line track suite wearing clubbers were on Rembrandt Plein chewing away at their spearmint gums and nursing their Heineken beers. The young pimple faced crowd, complete with binge drinking friends from England, collected in front of the Stadschouwburg on Leidse Plein. The weekend tourists, with their heavy duty cameras, were sprinkled along the Prinsengracht ogling at the passing boats.

The gay crowd use to all bunch into Regulierdwarsstraaat. In the more recent past they have split up into 3 groups. The transvestites and their fans have moved to the Westerkerk, and the sporty, swimming club, older gays congregate on the Amsteel Bridge near the Amstel Tavern. It was a beautiful sunny day and we split our time between the club music of the Reguliers and sing-along of the Amstel. Our jovial friends, Victor and Paul, were over from Vienna and equally fun-loving Paolo flew in for the weekend from Milan. We spent our day drifting just above the ground, smiling and chatting with each other. The muscle boys from Splash gym filed past. The tall handsome boys from the swimming club were standing in the sun on the bridge. The smiling boys from London invited us for a drink. And finally we invited ourselves to the after party with the Italian Lebanese crowd. We kissed, we chatted, we greeted, we even danced a bit as the sun slowly set over the canals and colored the skies into an orange finale. Paolo and I decided that the day was over all too fast and spent the night pub and club crawling. It was one very tired body that finally got into bed around 4 am in the morning. But even when you close your eyes the drum beat goes one in your mind and the faces continue to file past you like actors in a macabre dance.

On Wednesday it was precisely 65 years after the liberation of the Dutch from the Germans. Wednesday is the day of celebrations and Tuesday evening is dedicated to the remembrance of the dead. As work and the management team dragged on during Tuesday evening, I did not get to the commemorations on Dam Square on Tuesday evening. Just as well as the proceeding were rudely disrupted by a man screaming bomb which led to an ensuing stampede that injured several onlookers. The celebration on the Amstel was much more peaceful and joyful and there was an atmosphere of defiance and above all support for the Queen. They build a huge stage on the Amstel River and normally a fleet of small ships moor on to each other on the opposite side to view the performance. An orchestra from Limburg, together with local opera and musical stars, performed a pleasant mix of songs from operas and musicals. The highlight is really the Queen’s arrival and even more important her departure by boat. It is moving to see the love of the Dutch for their Queen. She seems such a binding factor. Her grandmother was such a huge symbol in the protracted and costly liberation of both the Netherlands and eventually the whole of Europe. How we rally around symbols and concepts! It seems to make us feel safe. It makes us belong. It gives a strange meaning to our own existence. That lady with her huge wind proof beehive, fast aging, rather bent over, increasingly dressed in black, is so much more than her physical self. She embodies and symbolizes all those values that define the Dutch as a society: perseverance, diligence, consensus, industrious, art-loving, creative, caring and above all freedom!