Just to give you a sense of context, that’s the current motto of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. Yes, Fab!ulicious, with the exclamation point. When has an airport ever been so cool?
And when has a city ever been so cool as on April 30, Queen’s Day? According to the Metro paper (Amsterdam is so cool, it got this fluffy daily commuter tabloid years ago, well before NYC did), more than 400,000 people came out on the streets in Amsterdam on Saturday to celebrate the queen’s birthday, the Netherlands’ biggest national holiday. That’s more than half the city’s population. Some 160,000 people came in from elsewhere on the train.
Total number of arrests that day: 60.
I don’t see something like this happening in the States, ever–and not just because we don’t have a queen. (The name of the one here is Beatrix, by the way–Trixie, for short.) But in Amsterdam, it’s totally normal for everyone from 3-year-old kids to twinkly eyed grannies to push out into the streets and canals in their best House of Orange gear and party like rock stars. I even saw a Sikh wearing a bright orange turban. (And the Dutch complain immigrants don’t assimilate enough!)
As a bonus–that is, alongside all the public beer vendors, blaring techno and disco anthems, boats full of aging rock stars playing live sets, people wearing orange feather boas and so on–Queen’s Day produces what’s probably the world’s largest yard sale. Something about vendor’s licenses (and a lack of yards) prohibits people from selling their junk on the street the rest of the year, but on this one day, it’s a flea free-for-all. Days before, people start marking out their patches of sidewalk with tape and chalk; you can practically hear people sorting out all their useless crap behind their doors.
I didn’t wake up early enough to see the good stuff, I admit (the night before is Queen’s Night, when everyone goes out to clubs)–but there was something so bizarrely heartwarming about all this optimistic commerce, even at 3pm, when the only stuff anyone had left was totally useless. And in between people selling puffy-shoulder leather jackets and decks of 49 cards and raspberry tarts rendered in ceramic were other entrepreneurs: an 8-year-old girl busking with her accordion, for instance, and a booth selling Polaroid photo ops of you sticking your head out from between Princess Maxima’s legs (Will you be the next royal child?”).
With everyone high on something, or just plain drunk or giddy, all the bizarre street action and the steady roaming around through crowds, it felt a lot like Burning Man. But, and here’s the heresy, it was better, and precisely because money was changing hands. I didn’t think I was much of a capitalist, but commerce honestly did improve the experience, and not just because there was someone prepared to sell me a super-dense and delicious orange-frosted donut or a pancake cut into the shape of a crown and covered in orange sprinkles. (Also, by the way, there was a lot of pumpkin soup and fresh orange juice being sold–because they’re, duh, orange.) Because I could choose who to give my money to, I didn’t have to accept pointless kitschy trinkets with a smile as part of a “gift economy”, as I do at Burning Man. Instead, I could laugh my ass off at some enthusiastic Dutch guy doing his best third-world salesman impression (“You buy! My friend! Special price!”) after we picked over his 1970s Dutch cookbooks and vinyl suitcases and said no thanks. We could give a euro to the accordion girl, and maybe she’d do better in the future. We could stop every two blocks and buy another beer, rather than having to schlep them on our backs all around the desert, or risk dying of thirst. We could nod sagely at the dangers of accumulating too much stuff as a woman ankle-deep in golf balls, hair straighteners, egg cups and other flotsam, wailed, “I can’t give this stuff away!” (And I could buy a perfectly decent pair of sandals from her for one euro.)
I guess it makes me a grumpy, art-hating anti-idealist, but even though I’m fond of the temporary dreamland of Black Rock City, I do like cities the way they function now–especially Amsterdam, which is almost ridiculously too functional. And even when it’s not Queen’s Day, there are enough kooks in the streets and enough do-what-you-want attitude that it’s kind of like BRC year-round. I’ve been going to Amsterdam since 1994, and envying so many things about the place all along (No working poor! Bikes everywhere! Topless women on billboards!), but I do appreciate it more after having been to Burning Man, because it’s comforting to know that this ideal place that 30,000 people strive for every September is at least partially existent over here in Europe all the time. I’m perfectly willing to carry my wallet around for that.