Monday 7 March 2011

A Carnival of Cyclists

Originally a sharp religious division ran diagonally through the Netherlands. South-east of it lived Catholics and north and north-west of it lived Protestants. Nowadays almost 43% of the Dutch are non-religious, but once every year the old division becomes very clear again: at Carnival.

Only the originally Catholic south really celebrates Carnival.
The celebrations for this year officially started at Sunday 6th March and stop at midnight the following Tuesday. In the south of the Netherlands this party is taken very seriously by young and old. And how better to reach the festivities than by bicycle.


Which creates a Carnival of cyclists... all kinds of people on all types of bikes in all sorts of costumes. And they are almost all showing the colours of the city, in this case: red, white and yellow.

Carnival in 's-Hertogenbosch is considered the oldest in the Netherlands and was already celebrated in 1385. The Dutch honour their traditions!

8 comments:

David Hembrow said...

Mark, I had no idea this video was on the way. Very nice. We don't have this at all up here, as you know.

ibikelondon said...

Makes for a very nice change to see orange being worn on bikes when it is not a hi-vis vest!

Carnival looks like a great way to banish the winter blues.

Neil said...

Very good. Though the car/bike interaction didn't look as friendly as David normally shows.

Frits B said...

@David: We do but on a much smaller scale:
http://www.mijnalbum.nl/Album=SN4IWMKJ
and I suppose most people think it's a waste of time. Drenthe has its Easter bonfires.
This here is on Steendijk. And note the Prince rides a bakfiets ...

Frits B said...

Oh and David, this Saturday:
http://salsa2.latinnet.nl/salsa_agendaevent-10139-packeddate-2010_03_13-uinf-brazilaansecarnavalassen.html

But you won't see me there!

Frits B said...

Re my last reply: this apparently was last year.....

David Hembrow said...

Frits: That's a shame. I thought as I typed it that I had heard something about carnival here. However, it doesn't look quite the same as further south.

Frits B said...

David: No of course not. We're sensible people here.