The past two weekends, my cousin(‘s son) Sam was on a visit with me here in Amsterdam. This meant I got out more as tour guide than I’ve been able to do lately, and on foot often enough that I saw things differently. Interestingly, the very last post in this particular series appeared just shortly before I flew out of Dhaka during covid, and in that post I actually referenced good ol’ Sam, who’d been a big fan of my various series and posts during the covid months in Dhaka. This is mostly half-marathoners passing the Rijksmuseum last Sunday, with a few of the last marathoners also reaching the last couple miles…
My farewell ode to Vondelpark (A’dam’s most famous and tourist-beloved park) and its open air theater, since I moved away from its immediate vicinity more than two months (!!) ago already, and am now taking my sunny-moment or end-of-work-from-home-day strolls in the lakeside Sloterpark further north and west.
Given how much shorter the days are becoming here in the north now that we’re past the solstice, I figure I’ll have a chance to catch more city-lights photos with the long dark nights that’ll fill the coming six months :-/, so I can spare two in one post. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the apartment I’m now in gives me lovely views at all hours from high above the city – including these shots from mid-August, with a sliver of moon and the earliest glimmers of dawn before sunrise.
Imagine my surprise, while up by NL’s excellent public transit network in a small town north of Amsterdam for our first team-tennis match of the season (we won 4-2, thanks very much), to see this lone California poppy brightening the sidewalk scene as a little memory of (my other) home for me :-).
There’s a degree of honor on my side and trust on yours about these urban and country canal categories: the one above was taken one evening when I went for a walk by my apartment after work, while the one below, much more clearly urban in nature, is on my bike ride home from where I play tennis, which is a now a very different path than the Schinkeleilandenpark bike path which I used to photograph a lot, going and coming from tennis.
Sunset from my apartment on my birthday, just over a month ago, was pretty much a full two hours later than it is already now :-(. That’s the seasons here…