Taking this photo early last Saturday caused me to be late enough (= 3 minutes) for that morning’s yoga class that the teacher scowled at me a bit and I felt guilty. But the frost on the railing of this foot / bike bridge caught my attention as another possible image for the water series we launched yesterday. But though I’ve shown you this windmill and canal already twice before, I like how this image came out so much that I’ve decided to post it now as my first blog photo actually taken in 2025. The foot / bike bridge, as you might see from the photo, also descends a good meter or two from its southern to its northern side, and zig-zags a bit.
During the walk on which I took all of these neighborhood-bridge photos just before Christmas, we had three separate episodes of sleet and one of rain, with sun and cloud mixing on both sides of each sleet or rain event… Winter in A’dam.
I’ve decided to begin the new year with a first entry celebrating light in the darkness of winter. And to use up just about every remaining 2024 photo that could fit into this category all in one go, thus beginning what readers have termed my annual mad rush to empty my folders of last year’s photo before I take a blog break and then resume. Among the things you’ll see if you look for them in the gallery below are (light) pears in trees on Dam Square in the heart of the city; quite a few images from this year’s light festival (which include many showing a series called “moon rise,” as well as the one saying “closed until canals freeze over:” that’s art!); a view down one of the famous canal intersections in which you can see the arches of nine different bridges all lit up as that canal travels southward under other street bridges; and two specific photos looking out from my apartment, one of which shows a building lit as a Christmas Tree and another showing the early-morning deliver early last month of a truck bringing some absolutely massive construction equipment for the new high-rise apartment complex they’re building across the street from me. (Over my morning tea, I watched the drivers and lead trucks sort out how navigate the super long truck around the traffic circle below us, including at one point taking out and then putting back a road traffic sign. And lots of other impatient cars turning and around going back the wrong way, which they could get away with b/c of how early it was.)
Oops, somehow I skipped this lovely new series when I ran through the “6” set, so now I need to catch up. Since we’ve shown you bridges in Paris and Berlin so far in this series, I’m home to Amsterdam for this first catch-up post, a lovely pedestrian bridge (bikes also, but the paths to the left side there aren’t paved and do wind a fair bit through a surprisingly wild patch of parkland) the park across the street from me.
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 :-).
Oops, somehow I skipped this lovely new series when I ran through the “6” set, so now I need to catch up. Since we’ve shown you bridges in Paris and Berlin so far in this series, I’m home to Amsterdam for this first catch-up post, a lovely pedestrian bridge (bikes also, but the paths to the left side there aren’t paved and do wind a fair bit through a surprisingly wild patch of parkland) the park across the street from me.
(so much world, so little time....) 