3 October

Every 3 October, there is a huge party in Leiden, celebrating the city's relief from a Spanish Siege in 1574, during the Eighty Year's War.  It is a massive party and everything is shut down for the day.  I didn't go.

Mostly this is because I have class on Mondays.  I think I might have been able to convince a history teacher of the need to participate in this shared cultural memory (if it was my other class, I really might have tried because that class is all about cultural memory) but my Monday class is more of an International Relations study and I don't think they would have been too moved.

The rest of the reason I didn't go was because of herring.  It is traditional to eat herring and white bread, first thing in the morning, because it was the first food that the Leideners got to eat when they were released from the siege.  And I bet if you're starving, herring tastes pretty amazing, too.  They hand out the herring and white bread for free.  It seemed like, had I gone, it would have been really culturally awkward to refuse to eat the herring and I decided that the better part of valor might be avoiding situations in which cultural sensitivity necessitated me eating raw herring at 7 o'clock in the morning.

The local Leiden paper, the Leidsch Dagblad, included a bunch of pictures of the festivities.  If you click here you can see them.  When the page opens you will see a rather scantily clad woman who participated in the parade but if you scroll about half way down the page, under a label that says "Leidens Ontzet 2011, de dag in foto's" (Releif of Leiden 2011: the day in photos), you will see the picture and you can either let it do a little slide show or you can click on the little "+" sign under the picture to go through them at your own speed.  Looking through the first pictures I was feeling kind of bad.  Here were all these people singing patriotic songs together (even if rather early in the morning); it is apparently a big rite of passage with baby bibs commemorating it; and here I had decided to skip it.  After all, I thought, if I had gone over early in the morning I could have returned in time for class and I could have at least sung some songs and seen the parade and been part of something larger than myself.

And then I got to the pictures of the herring and I didn't feel the least bit bad anymore.  This year, apparently, Leiden set the record for the most herring eaten at a public event in 4 hours (or something like that).  They had officials come to weigh baskets of fish before and after every one had eaten and then estimated from that how much herring was eaten.  It was a lot.   And they looked gross.  And, I bet, they smelled strong at 7 o'clock in the morning.  If you click here you can go to a page with a video about the herring.  It is worth watching, even if parts of it are in Dutch.  The Guiness World's Record guy appears a couple of times and speaks in English and there is a woman demonstrating the approved way of eating a herring (at 7 o'clock in the morning!).  Also, you can see Leideners queuing in their pajamas, waiting to pick up their floppy herrings and you can also see inebriated Leideners (at 7 o'clock in the morning!) singing patriotic songs together.  It appears that good times were had by all and my qualms at missing what is most probably my only opportunity for participating first hand in the Leiden Ontzet Festival are almost entirely assuaged by the fact that I didn't have to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and spend $20 on a train ticket to eat raw herring.

I did, however, eat stampot, out of solidarity, and that worked out quite well.