August is Pride Month in Amsterdam, so we wandered up there to see things at the end of the Pride Parade a few weeks ago. The first time this post went up, a glitch deleted the sadder gallery below, one of those reasons I’m so happy to now live in a place where I can be more fully myself :-).
Two more images photographed on that clear late-July walk home from the Concertgebouw, to the apartment I now no longer live in, hence the choice to use both images in the same post as a bit of a farewell to that neighborhood. 🙂
My recent outing to the museum at Paleis Het Loo, spurred by that Guardian article my friend Steve linked me to, has caused me to decide I should start a new series on royal – related locations. After all, royals since time began have generally had privileges, as well as residences, gardens and even vehicles (e.g. below from an exhibit in the former royal stables) that most humans at any given time or place couldn’t dream of. Into this new category might have gone one or two of the post from our visit last year to Vienna — in a nation now no longer a monarchy, but still earning tourist income from visitors come to see those residences. Or perhaps some posts from those royal residences of Rajasthan which I visited more than 13 years ago, that both inspired me with their beauty and troubled me as indications of a hugely unjust socio-political system. Thus my name for this new series: I’m wanting to admire the beauty while I question the socio-political system, along with all socio-political systems (e.g. late-modern capitalism and its manifestations in the land of my birth) which allow power and wealth to concentrate, often in dynastic and family lines one way or another. Ugh, wealth, power and its perquisites. And yes, those gardens you see through the gilded-fruit-tree window decoration below are gardens whose canals you’ve already seen a few times :-). Gilded fruit trees: lovely but rather quintessentially “ah, royal,” don’t you agree?
These shots were all taken in Beatrixpark, south and east of where I used to live. We wandered over there in order to see more delegations in the festive starting parade for the Amsterdam World Gymnaestrada 2023 two weekends ago. It’s apparently a non-competitive gymnastics gathering that began here in A’dam 70 years ago (?), and aside from watching the flags and seeing which ones we recognized, we enjoyed seeing how much fun the highly diverse (in age most notably) the walkers were having with each other and the event. African, Asian and South American nations were generally less represented than European nations, but I was happy to see Zimbabwe bringing up the end of the alphabet, just before the very large Netherlands contingent, who as host country were the last delegation. It was also fun to note the occasional country that snuck in out of alphabetical order – generally more fun and less formal than you’ll see on TV with things like the Olympics :-).
Last possible use of the lovely palace gardens at Paleis Het Loo as my excuse for not biking out of town to take some photos of a waterway that more fully meets the criteria for a Country Canal…because there are no more waterway shots from that lovely afternoon, which by the way was the Sunday (!) on which I returned home, opened my email, and learned that the owners of my last apartment were making me move. (I’m told that new laws give more protection to renters, so many owners are turfing folks out now while they still can.) I still haven’t shown you the actual gardens or palace building, so as apology and taste of things to come, this shot below in which a visible wee waterway that also resembles a canal manages to qualify it for Paul’s own self-imposed definitions. 🙂
Same walk as the last entry (in fact directly across the street from the last shot), above a grocery store that I used to shop in frequently for the two years I lived in that old place…and it took me being on an evening walk in search of “city lights”-worthy images to finally notice this interesting artistic flourish 🙂
I had run out of images I could legitimately post as “City Lights” entries, and its rotation was coming up again recently, so I set myself daily reminders each evening to “take city lights photos!” so that I’d be nudged out the door. I took this, as well as our last post in this series on a late-evening walk home from Gilberto Gil’s “Farwell to Amsterdam” concert at the Concertgebouw – so I guess those reminders opened my eyes to new possibilities for this series, eh? Fun fact: the Concertgebouw was an easy 20-minute walk from my old place. It was about a 25-minute bike ride the other night coming home (to this new place) from my last concert of the summer season, a glorious first exposure to Ayanna Witter Johnson, who explained before playing her cover of “Roxanne” that she got a big boost during covid lockdown after the Concertgebouw posted this video of her performing it in an empty recital hall – the very hall where we heard her performing last Friday along with her backup band as well as the Ragazze Quartet.
I really must get out to the real countryside and take more canal photos. I also need to show you more of Paleis Het Loo (thanks to Steve, without whom I wouldn’t have known we should stop by that palace when we were in the neighborhood in late June) than just more of these shots from their lovely palace gardens…
(so much world, so little time....) 