Taking advantage of our central European location, I decided to head up to Amsterdam to watch Holland play last Sunday in their 3rd World Cup Final, and first in 32 years . A quick 90 minute drive got me just a 30 minute train ride from Amsterdam Central station. Although a short train ride, it might have been the loudest 30 minutes I have ever experienced with all of the vuvuzela’s being blown. It was ridiculous. A 20 minute walk from there, and I had arrived at the Museumplein (Museum Square), where >100,000 Dutch fans gathered to watch the game (which was actually being played in South Africa).
Forget the passport, you needed some orange clothing to get into the country on Sunday. For those with more limited closets, I saw creative body paint, life jackets, and highly reflective orange jumpsuits doing the trick.
I arrived just before 3pm, a full 5 and 1/2 hours before kickoff, and the party had already started. The front “half” of the square was already packed, and they weren’t letting anyone else in. The second half was well on its way, and a quick walk through told me it wasn’t the right place for me to watch the game. Plenty of singing, dancing, and general happiness until around 6pm, when the party “officially” started. This, of course, is when the beer tents opened! Local radio personalities started talking over the loudspeaker, and really got the crowd going with some local / national songs that literally had 100,000+ fans screaming, clapping, and waving their hands in unison.
The most impressive moment occurred at 8:30pm, when immediately after kickoff the aforementioned 100,000+ fans who had spent the last 5+ hours partying, singing, screaming, and dancing, immediately turned extremely, quiet, deadly serious, and intensely focused on the game. I left the park at halftime, and worked my way through multiple pubs as I headed back towards the station to catch my return train. For those who didn’t catch the game, Spain scored with only 4 minutes left in overtime, leaving the Dutch with no excuse to miss work Monday.
