A large crowd of young people is crowding each other in the rain. Horning scooters and ringing cyclists try to make their way through the crowd. There is yelling, yelling and singing. It is Saturday night, ten past twelve, on a corner where two Groningen nightlife streets meet on the Grote Markt.
If you want to get a croquette or egg ball sandwich at the snack wall, you must deftly squeeze through the people who have already obtained their snack. Cops watch from the street corners.
The bars and clubs have just all closed at the same time, at 12 o’clock in the morning, due to the corona measures. And now thousands of young people walk simultaneously, as if through a funnel, through the narrow streets towards the Grote Markt, where there is a sea of bicycles.
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Normally, four bus lines also serve the Grote Markt on this corner. That has gone wrong in recent weeks. The buses were kicked and beaten, bicycles were thrown in front of them. “The safety of our drivers, travelers and people on the street was at stake,” said a spokesman for carrier Qbuzz. On Wednesday, the carrier, together with the police and the municipality, decided that it was no longer possible. After eleven o’clock in the evening, the buses now run around the Grote Markt. Since then, there have been “no more excesses”, say the police and the municipality.
‘Really too full here’
But the crowds are clumsy, says 21-year-old Nancy. She just had to wait 45 minutes to pick up her coat at the StadsWarderobe – a central place where you can store your bag and coat at night. Now she finally has her bike in hand. “It’s really too full here.” The problem, she says, is that mandatory closing time. Normally, the entertainment area gradually empties. “Then people leave at two o’clock, or at three o’clock.”
Other bar-goers don’t understand it either. Should that mandatory closing time reduce the number of infections? How? Psychology student Marloes (20) points to disco bar Wolter Wolthers, where she had just been with girlfriend Anna (also 20). “It’s full here at ten o’clock. Then you stand like this for two hours.” She holds her hands together. And that is safe? “Nonsense.”
Since last Saturday, the discotheques and dance clubs have been allowed to open again, because the one and a half meter measure no longer applies. Mayors would have liked the mandatory closing time to be abolished at the same time. The cabinet had the 25 mayors of the Security Council there asked for in vain. “We cannot follow that things would go less well at two o’clock in the morning than at ten o’clock in the evening,” said Hubert Bruls, mayor of Nijmegen and chairman of the Security Council in a TV program. On 1.
Snollebollekes
Especially cities that normally do not have a fixed closing time, such as Groningen, are struggling with the measure. “Normally it is not that busy in that corner,” says a spokesman for Mayor Koen Schuiling (VVD). “Now we are suddenly confronted with a huge peak outflow.”
It starts at ten to twelve. In the narrow Peperstraat, full of cafes and clubs, a police officer gestures to the employee in the doorway of Donovan’s cafe. With his index finger he spins a circle in the air: rounding. The woman nods, shortly afterwards the first people come out of the cafe.
The exodus is also starting from other bars. But music is still blaring from a crowded karaoke bar Sing Along at noon. The whole place hosts to music by the Snollebollekes and André Hazes. The windows are fogged up. The passing crowd gleefully hosts. At five past twelve, that bar also empties. Yelling and screaming, the crowd moves through the rain to the Grote Markt.
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What now? The city is still teeming with house parties. “We’ll try to find an address soon,” says Casper Smit (22) earlier in the evening. But he seems to be an exception. Most people think it was beautiful. “I’m going home so well,” says Hamzah Al-Koundri (21), who is sheltering under a shelter. “Sleep well.”
Marloes and Anna don’t even think the early closure is such a disaster. “If you have to leave earlier, you go to bed earlier and you are less broke the next day,” says Anna. Although they usually first get something to eat at the snack wall. “Before you know it, you’re standing there talking for an hour,” says Marloes. “Then you say: shall we continue at home? With whom? And then everyone goes home anyway.”