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As promised, Amsterdam gay pride parade.

For those of us from Vassar, it's the homo hop on water, only during the day and with a greater diversity of spectators (and participants).

The parade consists of a series of boats. They're each playing their own music (most of them were playing some sort of techno). The boats start out at a dock near Centraal Station, and they go along Prinzengracht (past the Anne Frank House), turn left at the Amstel (away from our apartment, sadly), and finish at a dock on the other side of Centraal. We met up with some people from Casey's office (not an easy feat in itself) and watched for maybe 2 hours. I think we missed the beginning, but we stayed until the boats going by were smaller and much less enthusiastic, at which point people seemed to agree that the parade was over. Then we went to watch Superman IMAX.

This year's theme was "Rembrandt," to commemorate his 400th birthday. I chose this photo for today because I thought this was the float that did the best job with the theme, of the few that didn't ignore the theme altogether. There were a few others that had painting motifs, but this one was way cooler. It was a relatively large one, everyone on the boat was wearing black, and most were wearing the white collars and coordinating their dancing. And it had never occurred to me from looking at paintings just how well those collars bounce around when their wearers are dancing!

But I said "diversity," didn't I? There were people of all ages, in the audience and also on the boats. A man standing behind me put his daughter on his shoulders so that she could see. I think the most surprising thing for me was all the corporate boats. Several banks had boats in the parade (my favorite of those was ING's), and Shell Oil had a good one, too. There was a parade-provided banner on each of the corporate boats, which said "Personal Pride = Company Pride."