Nike's last Write the Future spots here say: Als je alles geeft, verlees je niet. (If you give it everything, you don't lose). It's pretty safe to say people here gave everything, and then some.
I'm sorry I lied in my previous post - the party was apparently not over.
Organizers decided to go ahead with the full celebrations to welcome home the Dutch World Cup team on Tuesday, with a 2-hour canal parade and a big celebration at Museumplein.
Depending on what you read, anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million people filled the streets and canals to say thank you for a thrilling four weeks to Bert and his boys.
The result was really all things Amsterdam - alternately chaotic, cheesy, charming, cool, crazy, and canal-filled. And confusing (we did lose, right?).
From the impossibly schmaltzy Guus Meeuwis - whose melancholic traditional songs are popular with millions of Hollanders but make some of us want to make a van Gogh of it and cut off our ears - to world-class DJ Armin van Buuren, it was a massive love-in, sing-along and dance party. The players were visibly moved. The refrain most often heard from them and from commentators was "Can you imagine if we had actually won?"
I caught part of it all live on a break from a TED conference (more on that in a subsequent post). Was it a little odd to be hearing "We Are the Champions" all over town when we were, er, not? Yes. But the overall spirit and outpouring of appreciation was enough to muzzle pretty much anyone's inner cynic.
Check out the full 4+ hours here. It does a far better job of capturing the images than the few photos I managed. I've outlined a few key timestamps below, but it's worth clicking on random spots as well. Another amazing day.
02:32:55 - pre-canals
02:40:00 - the canals
03:42:40 - intro to the players
04:00:00 - players get down
04:03:20 - amazing panoramas of the scene and the city
04:06:00 - Wesley Sneijder serving beers (let's see LeBron do that) + panoramas of the city
04:11:25 - a good minute-and-a-half montage of the entire day
Fans buying these obviously missed the first half where the Dutch could have gotten 2 reds
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