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.

We had a wonderful time at Full Frame 2010 two weeks ago. We saw more than 20 movies including some absolutely brilliant ones.

It really felt like a mini-vacation. On Saturday the first movie we saw started at 10.00 am and the last one ended around midnight.

John and Jane
Man Push Cart -- not a bad film, but very annoying that a fiction film made it into the programming. Sure, it says in the booklet but it has no place on Full Frame.

Here's a list of movies we saw on Saturday:

• Born Sweet -- a 15-year boy with arsenic poisoning which finds joy in karoake singing and becomes famous through his hobby.
• Today is Better than Two Tomorrows -- two boys in Laos are good friends. One of them is sent to become a monk and the two split up. Sweet movie.
• Book of Miri -- a short documentary about a girl in Sweden who was adopted and is looking for her identity. I wasn't crazy about it; Sasha loved it and apparently so did the jury because it won an award.
• In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee -- a second movie about adoption. Forty years ago Cha Jung Hee, the filmmaker, was adopted from South Korea. Everybody called her Cha Jung Hee, but she knew that that wasn't her real name. A social worked had swapped the girl. The movie maker goes to South Korea to find the real Cha Jung Hee. Wonderful movie.
• Stonewall Uprising -- description and reconstruction of the riots around the Stonewall bar in New York City, which started the gay rights movement in 1969. Interesting.
• 12th & Delaware -- on an intersection in Florida an abortion clinic and a pro-live pregnancy center are located on opposite sides of the street. Very intense documentary.
• The Sixth Section -- fun, short movie about Mexican immigrants in New York City who fund projects in their hometown.
• H-2 Worker -- older documentary about guests workers from Jamaica in Florida. Not bad, but we would have preferred to watch a more recent documentary instead.

On Sunday we saw 5 short documentaries, which was great:

After the winners were announced we went to see two of them:

• The Poot -- gorgeous short on how tapestries are made in Iran.
• Surviving Hitler: A Love Story -- stunning movie about a love story in Germany during World War II, with great footage and a beautiful interview.
• Maria's Way
• Notes on the Other
• Photograph of Jesus
• Seltzer Works -- the last setlzer factory in New York City. Short, interesting, beautiful camera work and a great topic.

The festival was well organized, as always. Last year the economic situation impacted the festival, but sales this year were strong, according to the executive director. The only downside was that the curated series wasn't very good. We saw several of the curated selections and didn't really enjoy them, except for The Sixth Section.