True to form, there were of course chunks of cheese and liver sausage as hapjes.

A couple of weak moments, but for the most, a blast and very, very true. Even if we have never witnessed willy-waving in the gym. 'Ja hullo,' said very loudly and with great indignation has never sounded better.

So please watch the video first with an open mind and then we can tear it to pieces afterwards.

We like the way it starts off with all the cliches at the beginning - flowers, windmills, canals, cheese, wooden shoes (why not clogs?) and then 'master paintings' what ever they are.

Then we get this smug twerp saying 'yes, yes, we have it all' with mock enthusiasm. 'Let me show you what is really cool about Holland.'

'You call it organic or artisanal - we just call it food,' he says voicing over delicious looking eats. A bit rich coming from the country that invented the whole-in-the-wall snack bar (Febo) and is one of the biggest factory farmers in the world. That's not to mention the horsemeat beef and fake free-range egg scandals.

Still, if you swallow that, you won't mind that 'you call it boutique and elternative, we call it the nine streets'. No you don't. You call it the Negen Straatjes, and yes, he does say elternative.

We get the obligatory bike bit and then he asks if we noticed he is speaking English because 'we all do'. Duh! A whizz through the Rijksmuseum, a blast of alternative energy and then the clip ends with a massive plug for Schiphol airport and KLM.

Surprise surprise. Well, they are two of the four sponsors after all, and the video is an advert, not a serious attempt to sum up the Netherlands in two minutes and one second.

Mind you the city marketing department might not be too impressed with the YouTube debate which seems to focus on all the things the video left out, particularly the red light district and the weed.

Take the case of the 80-year-old man who was searched as he arrived at central station. Or the family whose children were drinking apple juice and  got upset when mum and dad were searched. 'I don't want this to happen any more,' the mayor is quoted as saying by the Parool.

Indeed, how could you search people who feed their children something as innocent and wholesome as apple juice? Now if it was cheap own-brand cola - well that would have been quite a different story.

The debate, says the Parool, was sharp... with GroenLinks saying the way Moroccan lads are always singled out from their white friends to be searched is equally distressing.

Still, thanks to the new rules, some of the inequities have been removed from the system - making it even more unfair on those who are left behind. Middle-aged men with briefcases, teenage girls with short skirts and tiny tops, people walking dogs.... who will be next to get a 'get out of a pat down free' card?

In the meantime, you know what you have to do if you want to smuggle a gun into a forbidden part of town. Disguise yourself as a old man, borrow a granddchild, feed it apple juice and you can get away with murder.

We like the way these workmen have solved the problem of bikes in the way of road works --- but it ain't going to be easy to get them back on dry land again.

What a rebel... today, despite all my rants and raves about it, I took advantage of the opportunity to cycle under the Rijksmuseum.

There were quite a few people taking advantage of this new opportunity - well, it is the first time in 10 years the passageway has been open to cyclists. Yippeee.

Most of them, I noticed, had smug grins on their faces. One girl in a brown coat cycled through and then turned round and cycled back again with a little smirk. Must be making up for lost time.

You may not realise it, but this splendid castle and its surrounding countryside are actually in Amsterdam.

The Parool says Muidersloot castle has cunningly been renamed Amsterdam Castle Muidersloot, the beaches in Zandvoort and Bloemendaal are Amsterdam Beach and the bulb fields as Amsterdam Flower Strip - at least according to new brochures designed to lure tourists to this all-encompassing metropolis.

It's not theft, Machteld Ligtvoet of the city's marketing department told the paper. Amsterdam, she says, is a strong brand and these new parts of the Dutch capital are benefiting financially from the increase in tourists. Who cares if the tourists get a little confused.

Tourists are at the centre of another power struggle being played out in Amsterdam which shows shows just how parochial city officials can be at times. The tale of the cycle way through the middle of the Rijksmuseum is a long, long saga... stretching back 10 years when the museum was closed for renovations.

To cut a long story as short as the piece of road, the dispute boils down to this: the museum bosses and local borough council of Zuid says the cycle track should remain shut - during the day at least - because of the danger to tourists and museum visitors. The new entrance to the museum is right next to the cycle track and we all now how blind tourists are when it comes to bikes - even when they are cycling on them.

Might seem pretty obvious, especially as the bike lane no longer leads anywhere since the museumplein was renovated many years ago. But no, not to the bike lobby and not to the bright sparks in city hall, who insist the cycle lane will be open on Monday as planned.

Roderick Evans-Knaup of local party Red Amsterdam (red as in save, not communist) sums it up pretty neatly really. 'Safety is being used as an arguement to delay the opening even longer,' he told the paper. Well yes, I don't think anyone is actually disputing that.

You might think there are more important things worth fighting about, but no. Even a short stretch of public road which goes nowhere is worth a battle...

Mind you, if the city council has its way, those pesky boroughs will no longer have any powers to do anything from next year. At first they came up with all sorts of plans and ideas to keep the boroughs alive, but central government has smacked them down.

So now there are to be no policy-making powers, no say in zoning and most of all, no choice about what they do with their money. The little fiefdoms must die.

ThisAmsterdam may side with Zuid over the bikes and the Rijksmuseum, but we are very firmly on the side of the Rijksoverheid when it comes to Zuid and friends. We're also very fond of Amsterdam castle, Amsterdam beach and well, while we are about it, what about the Amsterdam island of Schiermonnikoog?

The sun is out and the Dam was as busy as if it was Queen's Day already. It'll be a miracle if no-one ends up under a tram.

Spotted on the Keizersgracht. No confusion here about what these guys are selling!

Leaving the office, noted the city council has been busy again, putting up jolly new flags for next week's coronation that isn't one.

You get one for every €15 of groceries... well that's the theory. But the nice girls in our Albert Heijn always give you more than they are supposed to.

Still, the orange tide means the big day is getting ever closer. So far not everything has gone according to plan and they've had to drop the balloons and the song... the song with that horrible contrived rap. Just vile.  I do feel a bit sorry for the composer though... not his fault the team of bright sparks that had been put together to write the lyrics came up with such nonsense. And what is wrong with the national anthem after all?

I'm still very curious about how Amsterdam will actually cope. The mayor seems amazingly blase about it all... makes me wonder if he has ever actually spent Queen's Day in the capital, when the city centre gets so chocabloc with people you can't move. And how will he manage to combine the royal watchers with the drunken hoards?

I read in the Parool there are something like 10,000 police officers, including 160 teams of riot squad, on standby. Lots of reason for optimism there then.

It's back, but Brits hoping to stock up on socks and knickers at the new Marks & Spencer store in Amsterdam's Kalverstraat are going to be disappointed. It hasn't got any.

If you want the full-on M&S experience, you'll have to wait until next year for The Hague and 2015 for a mega 6,000 square metre M&S on the Rokin.

In the meantime, you've got a Dutch/English website, specially for the local market and you can pick up your orders in Amsterdam or have them sent to your home.  After all, you couldn't try on your socks in the store back home either, could you?

BTW, if you live or commute near Utrecht, there will be an M&S Simply Food store opening at a BP petrol station in September, followed by more in the Randstad later in the year. If they are a success, more will follow. So if the Dutch take a shine to chicken & leek pie, Maastricht may get lucky after all.

Oh boy. He does lead a rarified and weird life, and he is only 19, but is that any excuse to be so crass.

I've seen a lot of weird bikes in my time, but this one, parked outside a swanky office on the Keizersgracht, takes the biscuit. I guess you can't get much more sustainable than this?

We are a bit spoilt for choice about where to eat near us - lots of restaurants with every sort of food and a couple that really stand out. Azur Bleu was given 9+ by the mighty Johannes van Dam when it opened and well deserved it was.

The third time the crew and their mates started smoking at a table while we and other guests were still in the room and the fourth - and last - time was this weekend.

To start, the service was so so very very slow. We had to ask three times to get a glass of wine. It took 40 minutes to get the menu and another 15 to order.

The food itself was good in parts. The fish soup as fabulous as ever, the wild duck pate v. nice. But the main courses - well the lobsters were over-cooked and soggy, said the lobster eaters, the vegetables with the veal steak were cold (maybe they were meant to be a salad?) and the halibut was a bit on the mean side for €22.

They also forgot to bring our second bottle of wine until we reminded them several times and had almost finished our main course. We then sat in front of our empty plates for god knows how long.

Our mates had to leave before pudding. We had coffee and a brandy, but the brandy was in a short glass 'because they did not have any clean brandy glasses left'. Weird as no one around us was drinking brandy but there you go.

All in all, mwuh... shame shame shame shame. The only good thing was they also forgot to put the second bottle of wine on the bill. And I decided not to remind them. Don't suppose they'll notice anyway.

Last week a new Suriname take-away opened up round the corner. €12 for a roti speciaal enough for two. Perfectly fine food and no slow slow waiters.

Just when you thought they were being abolished, those wretched borough councils decide to keep on demonstrating why they should never have been created in the first place.

The project is a joint adventure between West and Centrum. The idea is to create 800 parking places under water, not as you might have thought to ease the shortage of spaces above ground, but to remove cars from public view.

This, the councils say, will improve the liveability of the area. All well and good, except for the fact that we like to have our cars in front of our houses, not 300 metres up the road, so we will drive around and around until we find somewhere to park that is a little more convenient.

And quite how chopping down a large number of the wonderful old trees which line the Nassaukade is going to help improve the environment is anyone's guess.

But the biggest joke of all this is the funding. The project, say the bright sparks will cost €60m, so anyone with half a brain (and who has watched how every Amsterdam infrastructure project spirals out of cost control) knows it will cost at least twice that.

So how will the bright sparks foot the bill? Why, by putting up the cost of a parking permit 75%. Perfectly logical really. After all, at a cost of €70,000 per parking place, somebody's got to pay.

It certaintly won't be the bright sparks of West when the borough councils are abolished next year and  they head off to the sunset clutching their big fat unemployment cheques.

Sales must have been massive over the Easter weekend. It seems every batch of young tourists you meet is wearing them. Are they better than fake fur or Russian army hats?