A Royal Celebration of Dutch Culture: Orange-Nassau Queens' Day

(ICD House, April 30th, 2011)

Berlin, April 30th, 2011 – The event was organized by Arnold de Boer, Bjorn Kolkman, Rozan Bank, Tiziana Marchesini, Attie Vermeulen & Eef Heersmink

On the 30th of April, the Dutch part of the ICD Team prepared the ICD House for a very special event; Queensday! Preparations started in the early afternoon, with decorating the ICD-House with a great amount of orange flags, balloons, banners etc. Next to that, we had also imported some of the finest Dutch delicacies, such as; stroopwafels, liquorish, poffertjes and some alcoholic schnapps like Orange bitter and Beerenburg.

Although the purpose of the evening was mostly to celebrate, we started up the evening on a more serious note, by watching the short movie ‘Fitna’ by the Dutch extremist right politician Geert Wilders. The purpose of this was to trigger some responses in order to have a discussion on the topic of multiculturalism. It turned into a very interesting discussion, thanks to the input of a group of people that all come from different cultural backgrounds.

After this, we served dinner, while enjoying some of the best Dutch music, and did what we do best on Queensday; dance and celebrate until the late hours!

We would like to thank everybody that made this night possible, including all our fellow interns, the participants from the UKMG conference, and of course the ICD for allowing us to turn the ICD House orange for a night. Thank you for celebrating Queensday with us!