Let me immediately confess color, the live registration of King’s Day is – with the arrival of Sinterklaas and the Eurovision Song Contest – in my top three of uncomfortable television. Voluntarily I can’t last three seconds to look at it, but this time I’ve kept the cup of orange bitter up to and including the very last swipe of Lee Towers on the podium on the Binnenrotte for you. Superlatives fall short. The richest family in the Netherlands celebrated the most expensive King’s Day ever in the poorest city. For the most uncomfortable parade of the year, this time Rotterdam was chosen and so much city promotion, Mayor Aboutaleb told the NOS reporter, “may cost a few cents”. pennies.
The mayor also expected another party in the city soon – Feyenoord is threatening to become national champion. “And you don’t hear anyone about the costs for that.” King Willem-Alexander confessed to the podcast the day before his entry Through the eyes of the king on the occasion of ten years of kingship that he is for Ajax. Ai. I think his preference for 020 was mentioned a dozen times during the two-and-a-half-hour walk through 010 – from South, across the water, to North. When he was finally asked point-blank by NOS reporter Malou Petter , he managed to get out of it. “I don’t want to jinx anything…”, he said. (Jinxen is youth slang for enchant, bewitch, invoke mischief.) “…but if a certain club becomes champion of the country, then that is also my champion.”
And then the discomfort. Rotterdam is a multi-cultural, international city. That was easy to deduce from the short conversations that NOS reporters had with the public behind the crush barriers. In one way or another, we think that diversity will only really be shown properly if we let the king take a kind of Efteling route past all population groups. And they may then show themselves to him singing, dancing and in full (or rather naked) regalia. Nothing to the detriment of the singing women in Afro-Surinamese costumes, the Arab belly dancers, the king and queen of the Caribbean carnival, the Hindustani dance group. But a king who stands looking at it a bit woodenly and claps out of time, that is pretty good in the language of youth ring then yes awkward. And also a little… 19th century.
After singing and dancing, talking was on the program and for the first time we could hear what the king was saying
The distance between king and subjects along the route meant that the television viewer could come closer than ever. After singing and dancing, talking was on the program and for the first time we could hear what the king was saying. He joined a wooden picnic table on the Afrikaanderplein to talk – briefly – with Rotterdammers about the slavery past. Singer Natascha Tusk used every second and asked whether the king was planning to apologize himself. “Wait a minute,” he replied. He ordered an investigation into the role of the royal house in colonial history at the end of last year and he wants to wait for the outcome. “Nothing sticks to me, but to history.”
In the meantime, Maxima was sitting at a table with a group of supplementary parents, where one of the mothers said that she had been under guardianship for so long that she has now become a certified administrator herself. “I am now self-employed in the debt industry.”
And through. Along the section specially designed for demonstrators who find King’s Day too expensive. the Royal House superfluous or both. A “bump ride” over water to North. There we see wheelchair basketball, hockey, kickboxing and the students of the Hermes House Band play. When asked how he felt about his birthday so far, the king lets out a deep sigh and says: “Unsurpassable.”