The New Year festivities in the Netherlands have left two people dead, dozens with serious injuries and destroyed Amsterdam’s historic Vondelkerk church.
The New Year festivities in the Netherlands have left two people dead, dozens with serious injuries and destroyed Amsterdam’s historic Vondelkerk church.
For a while I lived in The Netherlands and in my experience they’re complete total nutters when it comes to fireworks in New Year with tons of people throwing their own fireworks, even more than other countries were doing so is legal and which have similar traditions, such as the UK in Bonfire Night.
I keenly remember this one New Year when the fireworks was so crazy that at the end of it my quiet family neighborhood had become enveloped in a very thick fog that smelled heavily of burnt gunpowder.
So this does not surprise me at all.
Yeah and I loved it when I was young. We’d always to try not annoy others too much, not to scare animals etc. And great to meet people, the only time the Dutch are a little sociable. I don’t live there now but something seems to have changed in recent years, or maybe it’s because I’m not from a big city
Oh, I liked it too - if there’s one thing that good be nuts about is fireworks ;)
Also agree with the difficulty of socializing with the Dutch, especially as an immigrant who didn’t grew up there with a group of friends. Looking back, almost the entirety of my circle of friends in The Netherlands were other immigrants.
No idea how things are nowadays since I’ve left the country almost 2 decades ago.
You should visit Stockholm, it’s pretty much like this.