This weekend (1st of May) saw us going down to Mwanza, which is about a 90 minute drive from Blantyre, the us being myself, Bex and Matt. The 30th April is Queens Day in Holland, and there are 4 Dutch VSO's in Mwanza who had organised a special Queens Day celebration on Saturday 1st May. The former queen of Holland, Queen Juliana birthday was on the 30th of April. This day is always celebrated by the Dutch in a very festive way. In 1980 Juliana resigned and Princess Beatrix became queen of The Netherlands, Queen of Oranje Nassau. Although Queen Beatrix's birthday is on 30th of January, the Dutch still celebrate queensday on the last day of April. The only exception made in Mwanza is to shift this day to the first of May to ensure everybody is able to join.
We of course arrived on Malawian time at about 3pm for a 1pm start time, in true festive spirit we went as a combined team effort dressed in the colours of the Dutch flag, Bex in red, Matt in the middle in white, and me in Blue. We did get bonus points for our efforts, Bex got even more points, as she brought a bag of oranges that were actually orange (now before you get carried away and start saying what colour would you expect them to be, oranges in Malawi are actually green as are tangerines), an orange bangle and an orange necklace for Maryse and Marike, and 2 orange water pistols for Elko and Harman.
I think there were about 30 of us there all together and we were in 7 teams. All headed either by someone Dutch. Each team also had to have someone English and Malawian in it as well. The games commenced with an explanation of what was involved along with demonstrations. This is us all listening very carefully to the instructions!
Zaklopen – this was a sack race around an obstacle course which also included a jump! I have to say my performance in this game was sadly lacking but it was better than our team performance in one of the other games – but I digress. We didn't win any points in this round.
Here is a picture of the obstacle course.
After this game I ended up moving teams as some had had to depart early and team numbers were down.
The next game was Spijkerpoepen – the spijker stands for nail – I will let you work out the rest from the photo's. 
This game caused a lot of hilarity and actually I proved to be rather adept at it. So adept that I ended up as a ringer in 2 other teams and won all 3 of my races here. The long and the short of it is that you have a nail on a piece of string which is tied round your waist and hangs down behind you at just above knee level. You run up to the bottle at the end of the garden and turn round and then squat down and try and get the nail in the bottle.
The next game was the ruin of us all really and the last active game, this one was Turfstekers wandelen – this involved 2 wooden planks with 5 straps across each one, so as a team you had to stand on the two planks with your feet in the straps and then navigate the obstacle course, 2 teams go at the same time in opposite directions, it is perfectly acceptable, as it was in the sack race to try and knobble the other team as you pass. 
This is the other team trying their best to put us off – as this was our first corner and their last, I don't think they had much to worry about from our end as we were particularly bad at this game, and never really got further than about 6 feet past the start line, negotiating any corners would have been completely beyond us, as it was 2 straps broke on each of the planks we were using but not in the same places, and we never really managed to co-ordinate our left and rights, and just ended up in a heap on the floor, laughing hysterically. I don't think the gin punch had helped much!
It started to get dark by this stage and we had to abandon the last physical games until the following morning. Harman lit the braaie and the feasting began. 
After eating plenty we partook of a further 2 games, one was the quiz that they had organised – which was all about Holland and the Dutch people and customs and consisted of 36 multiple choice questions. Our Dutch team leaders and team players were not allowed to take part in this although we were allowed 5 jokers were we could call a Dutch member of the team back to help out 5 times. There was only myself and Chosomo left in our team. By this stage there was blatant cheating going on by 6 out of the 7 teams with lots of signalling going on from the Dutch team members to the various teams. One team missed out on this and got about 50%, which I feel was an extremely valiant effort in the circumstances, the rest of us all managed to score 30 something out of 36! I think personally I knew the answer to 2 questions. The final challenge of the evening was for bonus points and as a team we all had to perform a tableau representing Dutch life; the best would get the bonus points. Our team decided to use one of the bicycles and had the four of us on sporting plastic blow up tulips (these had been one of the obstacles on the race course) a bag of oranges and garlands of flowers. In the end the teams tied and we all got bonus points. Photos were taken of all the tableau's for judging purposes of course. Sadly I don't have one though to show you as was too busy posing in the tableau.
At about 10pm we decided to go to the local bottle shop for a game of pool. The bottle shops are the bars round here, when we arrived we rather took over the place, but it had hardly been jumping prior to our arrival it would be fair to say, there were only about 7 people in the place. It was nice to be able to walk around a place a night time; this is not something you can do in Blantyre.
We eventually got to bed at 2.30.
The following morning was spent in their lovely garden having breakfast. Harman cooked in total 63 pancakes, numerous slices of toast and about 5 packs of sausages. We left at about 1pm back to Blantyre to recuperate and recover! A brilliant time thanks to the Mwanza Dutch crew and all their hard work in creating a great weekend.
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