City Views.140
Our penultimate suite of photos from the lovely city of Arnhem, capital of the (by Dutch standards) very large province of Gelderland. My cousin Sam commented the first time I posted a photo of this historic cathedral that he loves the cathedral – simply because it’s a lovely and impressive structure and stands out in the cityscape, as you see. Add the history, to which I referred in an earlier post, and it gets even more interesting. But then, ask yourself how I got close enough to photograph the interesting sculptures of individuals you see in the photo above? And then look closely just above the left-hand clock in the photo below. Yes, that is one of two “glass balconies” built into this structure, and yes, I walked out onto both of them, and yes, even I who am really not afraid of heights found it a wee – bit – freaky. I do very highly recommend the experience and have already told Sam that we need to go when he visits. We’ll see if he can fit into his itinerary or not :-). In the gallery below, more photos from Arnhem as taken either from the church tower & glass balconies, or from my walks around town.
Urban Canals.100
Behold one of the largest moving structures in the world: the maeslantkering. I figured this would make a suitable entry for the 100th time I’ve posted this city / urban canal series. (Turns out when I first started, just after moving here in July ’21, I was calling it City Canals, to counterbalance a series I hoped to start that I still call Country Canals….and then at some point without noticing I just morphed it into Urban Canals. Sorry…) Anyhoo: this is, I think, technically within the municipality of Rotterdam but as you see it’s heavily industrial, not residential or commercial. For more on those parts of Rotterdam, check out for example this post.) We’re within a kilometer or so of the Hook of Holland, where the largest channel of the Rhine Delta meets the North Sea, and this large white structure is a movable storm-surge barrier intended to protect the city and inner port of Rotterdam. The outer port, where the hugest container ships dock, is behind the windmills you see in the panoramic photo just above, on south side of the river, in the Europoort Rotterdam and the Maasvlakte Rotterdam. I’ve bothered to learn all this partly because I’m just a geek and it fascinates me what the Dutch do with water and rivers, and partly because I read Neal Stephenson’s latest speculative-fiction novel during my multi-week visit to Myanmar, so when I landed back in NL and the guy I’m currently stepping out with suggested we drive the beach somewhere, I said “let’s go see the Maeslantkering!” (He has a car, I don’t, and really the best way to get there from A’dam is in fact by car, although there are public transit and bike methods, this being NL, after all…) And just to give you more sense of the general surroundings (good example of Dutch urban planning, what with artificial mountain-bike courses e.g. the small part below where I saw classes of kids being taught, canals, bike paths, etc. all snugged up against one of the largest ports and busiest shipping channels in the world), a bunch of other photos from the Hook of Holland and the immediate surroundings of the maeslanterking, below. (Yes, wiki has a nice piece about this structure for you fellow geeks out there. And yes, I finally donated today, recognizing that I’d be lost without wiki by this point.)
Urban Garden.110
Urban Canals.99
City Views.139
Village Views.27
Village Views.26
(so much world, so little time....) 