This year I finally made it! After a series of real crazy adventures and hitches and glitches in the past years, I managed to finally attend the RED HEAD DAYS in Breda (NL)!
The gathering takes place every year in the first weekend of September and is the largest in Europe of this type. There is also an Irish very popular one, and English one, one in Chicago (pretty recent, just 2 years) and one in Milan (Rossi days, still on my to-do list…).
In Breda the atmosphere was even over my expectations, very relaxed and all the people were super friendly.
It was an event targeted also for family and friends non-redhead themselves but related to red-head attending. There were photo shooting and expositions, concerts, movies around and about “the ginger world”, and a lot of other activities organized by the volunteers. Few people of the organization like the founder Bart, work all year around this event, this fascinates me and they owe my respect.
I met and American girl in a park during a break and we enrolled for the pub crawl on Saturday night together.
On Sunday we took part to the big photo shooting that used to win the Guinness World Record few times for the biggest concentration of ginger people in one place.
Even on such a short stay from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, I managed to explore the city, which is not too big but very pretty, do some shopping and discover some lovely cafes and trendy bars. You know it’s a country of beers, so on the weekend people go pretty crazy there, but not in a bad way…
On a personal note I admit I felt very special being surrounded by all those gingers, like being part of a secret congregation or a magic group. We were normal and the others were the exception, for once. Everyone with his very own shade of red. And then all those nationalities (some of them you wouldn’t really guess they could have ginger people among them) that remind us how important is genetic mix and therefore integration on higher scale, especially in such a bad historic moment we are living…
And if I think about the fact that all this started because a very pretty ginger girl told me about this event in London airport at the security check after chatting with me about our common strawberry blond hair color and the coolness of my Camden Town wellies… it’s pretty amazing… where life can take us, if we just allow it to.
(I wrote more about this topic here.)
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