Queens day in Sydney

For the past few years we celebrated Dutch queensday in Mumbai. You can read more about this here and here.  This is the first time we celebrate it in Sydney. Is it very different? Yes. First of all, we did not get tickets to attend the official celebration organised by the Dutch consulate. They put us on a waiting list. Luckily there was another party after the official consulate event and this is were we went. Instead of the Mumbai expat crowd we are used to, the party was mostly attended by twenty year olds. Of course this did not bother us at all, being so young ourselves. It was a good party with nice and inspiring sing a long music from amongst others Andre Hazes. I bet they did not play this at the consulate party earlier.

Today we went to the Queens day event organized by the Dutch club Neerlandia which is run by the older generation of Dutch people in Sydney. They speak a nice mixture of Dutch and English. It's a real difference with countries like India were you only meet expats who spent a few years in the country and then move on. Here you meet people who built a new life for themselves in Australia. They don't intend to go to back to Holland or move to another country.

Today was a beautiful day with lots of sunshine and nice Dutch food. Everyone was dressed in orange. The kids (and the parents) enjoyed selling toys at the 'vrijmarkt' (free market). As always, you end up buying more stuff then you sell... Sebastiaan and Julia earned six dollars and spent about sixty dollars on new toys. I already know what we will sell at the 'vrijmarkt' next year.