Tonight I attended two parties for Queen's Day in New York.

Both drew large crowds; there were hundreds of Dutch people, most of them in orange. Within 5 minutes at the first party somebody spilled beer on me; totally in line with past experiences years ago. It was a lot of fun; I especially enjoyed the second one in Mars 2112, organized by NLBorrels.com.

Queen's Day is my favorite day in the Netherlands, wonderful memories of Amsterdam.

Dutch immigrants and expats will celebrate Queen’s Day, or Koninginnedag, throughout the United States next week.

From New York to L.A.
Queen's Day will be celebrated in major cities in the U.S.; New York and San Francisco will host multiple events. The festivities in New York kick off with a reception at the Netherland Club of New York at 6.00 pm on Friday followed by an afterparty with an Indonesian rijsttafel and music.

A few blocks away, in Mars 2112, NLBorrels organizes one of the largest Koninginnedag celebrations outside of the Netherlands; last year more than 900 people attended.

San Francisco also hosts two events. The Dutch Consulate General, NLBorrels and Eurocircle organize a party at Apartment 24; the San Francisco Supperclub organizes a Queen's Day event. In Los Angeles a party will take place on May 1.

All around the country
Our page with Dutch-American events lists over 25 Queen's Day celebrations. Many of the events are organized in collaboration with NLBorrels.com.

Queen's Day is the national holiday in the Netherlands. Last year many festivities were canceled or reduced in scope due to the attack on the Dutch Royal Family in Apeldoorn.

On May 4th, Dutch Remembrance Day, there will be a ceremony at the Netherlands Carillon in Washington D.C., followed by Liberation Concerts in Los Angeles and Grand Rapids, MI the next day, Dutch Liberation Day.

List with Dutch-American events

It was a busy week at work; nice that it's weekend. Sasha traveled to Durham so we left for the airport early on Thursday, and she came back home yesterday evening late. By coincidence one of her professors from the Netherlands was in Durham Thursday also so they met up.

I'm working on a project for 'the other website' that involves scanning a lot of old documents into PDF files. It's pretty cool that Adobe Acrobat Reader has built-in OCR, and that OCR works so well these days. I haven't tried OCR in a long time; the previous time must have been when I lived with my parents some 15 years ago. OCR means Optical Character Recognition: the conversion of scanned images into text. The algorithms and technology has come a long way since 15 years ago, it's really a solved problem now.

No big plans for this weekend, perhaps we'll visit Rutgers, a local university in Somerset, which has a big cultural event today. Someone we know is participating and it would be fun to say hello.