If you’re wondering, yes I’ve shown you this canal several times before, but never when it was frozen so birds can walk on it. 🙂 This was the day returned from my vacation trip in Madeira & Porto. Eek! As upcoming posts will show, it’s since gone gray, rainy, and well above freezing but still fairly cold.
This year’s installation for the Amsterdam Light Festival in a little park near my office. You can see last year’s here. The whole festival is installed in and around canals on my office’s side of town, so I’ve seen some of them biking to and from work already, but do plan a boat tour some evening soon (not locked down this year, so I can do it a bit more warmly than last year!), and hopefully share some photos with you in future posts.
At least, if the sun had to be setting at 16:20, it was kind enough to be a clear (and cold!) day as the plane lined up for its landing at Schiphol last Wednesday :-).
Hortus (A’dam’s botanical garden) as seen from my walk from the metro station to work the day I flew to Dhaka – the rare occasion I didn’t bike due to the luggage at had with me, hence my ability to stop and take these photos of the lovely view :-).
You’ve seen this view before, by sunlight and focusing on the flower boxes on the bridge rail. Naturally, the real-life reflection of moon on water was even clearer and more lovely than this image could capture.
I suspect that the metalwork you see to the right here is part of a supporting – retaining wall meant to keep that side of the canal wall, and street / sidewalk to that side of the canal, from collapsing. Readers may be aware that the city is investing huge sums in steadily reinforcing and rebuilding some of the oldest (many hundreds of years) canal walls in the center of the city. Many of those oldest central canals have significant areas at risk of subsidence or collapse, since they were never built to sustain the weight of tour buses, trams, trucks and tourists who now flock to the lovely city. This was the first time I’ve noticed such a support anywhere, and I couldn’t tell if this was an intentional garden or just whatever nature allowed to land and grow there…
I’ve decided that when there aren’t so many flowers in bloom, small wonders can include lovely designer flourishes such as this statue – which I’m guessing must depict some fairy tale? – which adorns a bridge over a canal along one of my favorite walking and biking streets here.
(so much world, so little time....) 