Welcome back, dear readers. One or two of you have reached out to double-check that all’s well in my world. Truth to tell, it’s been a hard slog of a winter season / past six months in both life (A’dam really can get grim, wet, and windy in the winter months) and work. But there are moments of joy always, and this captures one of my finer bike rides to work recently. Imagine, if you will, the contrast between this and biking home into the wind and rain at the end of the same day. Which is a thing that has been known to happen more than one could wish, lately. I’ll try to get back to dailies soon, if not immediately.
This’ll be my last daily post for a while, ending with a reminder to seek and value small wonders in our lives. The cherry blossom pics below were taken on December 30! I first saw some of these trees in bloom on a gray late-November walk in 2021, and was delighted to see some trees in this same set again blooming again more than two years later at the tail-end of the wettest-in-history NL autumn of 2023. (The 2021 blooms were more pink-tinged, so might have been different specific trees but all in the same place.) What a blessing, given how monotonously, monstrously, constantly gray the autumn and winter months can here. Thanks to whatever urban and parks planners associated with the city of A’dam chose these trees to plant here. 🙂 The mushrooms above would have been photographed on my exploratory walks around my new neighborhood, after I moved to this new place in early August. Enjoy this break from daily posts and alerts, as I intend to. Who knows when I’ll be back to dailies.
Above: Stadsloket is one of the city’s administrative services offices, which are scattered around A’dam’s many neighborhoods. Below, two last photos taken along the marathon’s route in October, just west of the Rijksmuseum which you can see in the pics.
One of the big summer storms knocked down a few trees around town including this one in a park next to our office. Gallery below…every remaining A’dam 2023 photo with significant greenery in it 🙂
Above, the moon sets over Sloterplas as seen from my balcony window on the morning of 26 December. (Before hopping the train down to Den Bosch aka ‘s Hertogenbosch for that lovely day we showed you in our last post.) Below, a gallery of pretty much every other remaining “city lights” relevant photo I took in NL during 2023 but haven’t yet posted. A note about the dawn photo of storefronts: the rose-shaped light decorations, which you will notice extend all the way down the street, tell you that this street is “Rozengracht,” which means either the street alongside the Rose Canal, or Rose Canal. In this particular case, I’m unaware of there actually being a canal named Rozengracht any more, but I’m guessing there might once have been one and the street is all that remains after the city did what the Dutch have always done, redirect the water. It’s entirely possible a more-knowledgeable Dutch friend will either email me or post a public comment to educate us all :-).
Three important things happened today in my world: 1) The sun actually shone for most of the afternoon; 2) Clouds were sufficiently absent long enough for the sun to be still shining as it sank beneath the horizon (below, at 4:41:08 according to my camera — above was at 4:25:39); and, most important in my little world, the earth has rotated enough now that it actually shines in the windows on my balcony for a few short minutes at the end of its time above our horizon here. (For a comparison sunset further north and west plus several hours later, check this past post from early August: my windows face mostly north, a decent amount of west, with only one little sliver of southwest.) Note that it might have shone in a bit for a couple days now, but with clouds omnipresent nearly full-time since early October (I do not exaggerate), wouldn’t know. So this is just me sending a bonus post to let the sun feel appreciated and welcomed.
Cheating slightly here, since one shot was really taken in a village and the other in a city, but I think one must not continue the whole holiday-lights thing too far into the new year…
(so much world, so little time....) 