Last day of my third full year based here in Amsterdam, a city in which I’m now always happy to “come home.” It celebrates its 750th anniversary next year, with that light shining up into the sky originating from that first settlement. There’ll be anniversary celebration events all year, which you can check out if you’re planning or thinking about visiting the city. I’ll share a few shots of a recent sunrise over Sloterplas (where I live), to wrap up this year in ‘city views’ from home. 🙂
Trying to avoid overloading you all in January, by giving you a range of Amsterdam canal images early, with the classic tourist style above, on my way home from work a while back. The middle, below, if you’re curious, is a launch dock for kayaks, canoes, and other small boats — and connects, once you go through that claustrophobic tunnel, to Sloterplas, the lake I’ve been showing you regularly since I moved next to it last year.
Amsterdam’s annual winter light festival along the canals opened last week, so I’ve begun seeing them on my evening and morning bike commutes. We’ve shared many festival sculptures with you in the past. (If you view full version, select the label “winter lights” which you ‘ll see below in this post itself, and many will be from this lights festival.) I’ll be interested if any of the light sculptures this year will surpass what my favorite from the three years I’ve so far been enjoying this festival :-).
Sometimes an urban canal may look like a country canal – but as with our last entry in this series, note the high-rises in the background…and I think we we’re in the city limits of A’dam at this point on the bike path :-).
Though this may look idyllically countryside-esque, I think we’re within the city limits of Amsterdam on the bike path along the Amstel; note the high-rise office buildings of (I believe) Bijlmer in the background behind the more-picturesque windmill.
With this winter-sunset view of the Amstel in the heart of my adopted home city of Amsterdam, I leave all you dear readers for some undetermined period of time and complete my 365 days of at-least-one-post-per-day. I expect to be back in a few months — and any comments, post-views, or requests for less or more of this or that type of post in the interim may help guide me when I start the next chapter.
A brief stop on the magere brug (thin bridge) over the Amstel, on an extremely rare clear morning bike ride to work last week. We’re looking north along the Amstel towards the building which houses the National Ballet & Opera, plus city hall for A’dam, with the moon setting off the the west.
All from a delightful long walk over to and around Amstelpark, at a bend in the river where apparently Rembrandt liked to come for plein air painting, near this windmill in fact, according to the signs. 🙂
One of my favorite light sculptures from this year’s edition of the Amsterdam Light Festival, which this year I did by boat. Last year we were in lockdown, so no boat tours were possible, now that I know where to find them all, I can go back see some of my favorites again from the banks of the canals instead of from a moving boat :-). The building behind it is the Amstel Hotel, apparently the first hotel in Europe to be electrified, if I understood what the boat tour guide told us.
(so much world, so little time....) 