So officially queensday is to celebrate the birthday of the Queen of the netherlands, but in reality it is just an excuse to wear extremely silly orange hats, listen to bad cover bands in overcrowded streets, buy stuff that you would not buy on any other day and most importantly to get really really drunk in public and embarrass the shit out of yourself (of course if you are dutch you wont find any of this embarrassing). In order to get drunk queensday-style you must absolutely do so by drinking beer from cans (only other thing that may be consumed in between beers is oranje-bitter).

The fact that queensday is about drinking beer and nothing else becomes most obvious on the day after, when the streets are littered with green beer cans and when the supermarkets that have been open during the previous day look like they have been looted by a mob that only had one think on it’s mind (beer?). Smack in the middle of the annual madness is the Albert Heijn super market behind the palace on dam-square in Amsterdam.

The following pictures have been taken when i went there for breakfast shopping on the morning after Q-D. Albert heijn never being shy to squeeze the last cent out of every possible chauvinist occasion had literally crammed a beer display into every unused square inch of floor space.

[Note that all pictures depict seperate piles of beer found in the store. I have refrained from taking shots of the piles from different points of view]