Four hundred years ago this month, Henry Hudson sailed on a Dutch ship into what became New York Harbor, a journey that inspired traders from the Netherlands to become the first immigrants to New York and establish a tolerant, motley Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam.
[…] While many New Yorkers are unaware of the festivities […].
Times have changed since previous anniversary celebrations. In 1909, there were two weeks of events, forming what was then the biggest citywide celebration New York had seen with millions of participants.
In 1959, the current queen of the Netherlands, then Princess Beatrix, came to New York for the 350th anniversary of Hudson’s arrival, and celebrated with a ticker tape parade.
“The world then was a different world,” Dutch Ambassador Renée Jones-Bos said. “Now there are far more countries. You have to work harder as a country to show what you can do and raise your profile.”
September 11, 2009
New York birthday celebrations suffer heavy inflation
Tags: country marketing, maps, New Amsterdam, New York
HEMA ready for end-of-Ramadan feast
This is an ad aimed at people celebrating Eid ul-Fitr (known in Dutch as Suikerfeest), a feast that marks the end of the Ramadan (the Muslim fast), which appeared this week in the brochure of HEMA, a large and popular Dutch chain store.
I have never seen this type of advertising before, where a Dutch mainstream brand specifically addresses 5% of the population who are part of an Islamic culture, but what do I know? The commenters at Wij Blijven Hier, where I found this story (Dutch), seem to confirm my guess that this is a new thing though.
A couple of years ago, new media organisation Mediamatic.net tried to merge the HEMA with the Islamic design aesthetic in a project called El HEMA. The real HEMA first frowned at this clear misuse of their brand, but they soon turned around, even offering to take place in the jury of the related design contest. A commenter at Mediamatic’s site makes clear the importance of HEMA in defining and contrasting what we perceive of Dutch culture:
You enter a space where you cannot read a single letter, and yet you think: what do you know, I am at the HEMA. And even though you cannot read the price tags, you are sure the products cannot be expensive. After all, you are at the HEMA.
September 10, 2009
Surprise, the high-speed train is terribly noisy
This story has all the trappings of an ‘I told you so’, but the testing of the high-speed train has “turned the town of Berkel en Rodenrijs [South Holland] upside down” and “makes a huge racket everytime it goes by,” according to my good Dutch friends whose newly built house is about 250 metres from the track (see the streets on the left, near the tracks).
When I visit my mates in Berkel en Rodenrijs, I see this clean and quiet new track just waiting to one day get my derrière from Amsterdam to Paris in three hours instead of five, scheduled to start this December. In May this year when I took the French high-speed train (Thalys) from Amsterdam to Paris, the train still has to wait until Brussels-Midi to finally cruise at 300 km/h instead of the standard 90-140 km, in a train that as the Dutch say, ‘stops at every big tree’.
And now that my dream train trip draws nearer, the initial testing of the train has received 1,600 complaints from the people living between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, including Berkel en Rodenrijs. The actually start of the Dutch train services is secheduled for September 2011, but if these tests are an indication of what’s to come, the Netherlands will have yet another national headache on their hands.
(Links: telegraaf.nl, eenvandaag.nl, image: Google Maps)
September 9, 2009
Netherlands has highest train suicide rate in EU
Of all the 27 countries of the European Union, the Netherlands takes first place when it comes to railway suicides. The Netherlands has racked up 1,4 deaths per million kilometres of train trips made in a year, while the much sparser tracks in Germany gets 0,6 and Belgium, also a country with much track, scores 0,9.
Although some 190 people in the Netherlands killed themselves by jumping in front of trains in 2006 and some 193 in 2007, the figure was down to 164 in 2008, but was not included in the report of the European Railway Agency on this topic.
One of the possible explanations for the amount of suicides is the fact that people live very close to the tracks. In other countries people who are suicidal probably chose a different method.
(Link: dutchnews, Volkskrant)
September 8, 2009
Rem Koolhaas condenses the country a bit further
With 16 million people occupying a mere 14,526 square kilometres, the Netherlands is considered a densely populated country. For world-famous architect Rem Koolhaas that isn’t dense enough though. He imagined what the country would look like if the Dutch population density was that of Manhattan (shown here) or Los Angeles.
Strange maps doesn’t seem to mention where they got these images.
(Link tip: Tom Schuring. Image edited by me.)
Tags: cities, demographics, density, Los Angeles, maps, New York, population, USA
September 7, 2009
Jacques Brel at the ‘Pont d’Amsterdam’
Unique exhibit of Jean-Pierre Leloir’s portraits of Jacques Brel at the little café underneath the ‘Multatuli bridge’ (Torensluis). 24 Oranges very own Orangemaster will be spinning discs during opening night!
Bright Night, gadget extravaganza
Bright goes RL. The magazine that may be not entirely unknown to our readers will kick-off its series of Bright Nights, “presentations of inspiring innovators, demonstrations of cutting edge gadgets and displays of state of the art design.”
Premiere of Sorry Minister
Tonight starts the Dutch version of British hit sitcom Yes Minister, called Sorry Minister in Dutch. Tune in to Nederland 3 at 10 pm.
World record for watching telly now a Dutch record
Last weekend, the world record for watching television was broken by Efraim van Oeverenzondag, a 28-year-old student from Tilburg. He watched a whopping 86 hours of television in the building of media archive Beeld en Geluid in Hilversum and he only got 45 minutes of sleep. Since April of this year, the world record for watching television was held at 80 hours by a man from New Delhi.
(Link: destentor.nl)
Tags: Hilversum, television, Tilburg
Hotel offers baby bonus to attract tourists
According to a press release issued by the Westin Resort on the island of Aruba (part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), the hotel is offering couples a 210 euro cheque (300 USD) for conceiving babies at their establishment.
“Couples who were inspired by Aruba’s coral mating ritual during their fall getaway (September 1 – December 19, 2009), and can prove they conceived during their stay [by way of a doctor’s note], will receive a $300 ‘Conception Credit’ towards a return visit to the resort in 2010. With all the stress of preparing for a new arrival, the expecting parents will surely be in need of a pre-baby Caribbean retreat.”
Just remember that Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, the guy who allegedly kidnapped and killed American Natalee Holloway pretty much ruined any kind of tourism on the island for a very long time. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures.
Tags: advertising, Aruba, hotels