While our Amsterdam weather since December hasn’t been nearly as dramatic & dangerous as California’s, it’s still featured more rainy days than one really needs. So far as I can recall, the sun has managed to peek through the clouds on four days or so since about the week before Christmas, and on only one of those did it stick around very long.
This means getting out to parks is quite simply hard and minimally appealing. Seeing anything visually appealing once there, let alone bothering to take the phone out and photograph it? Even harder. Nonetheless, there was sufficient break in the rain — even a fleeting moment of sun — to lure me into the park on my way home from the gym this morning. By the time my camera was out, the sun had vanished. In the seconds between when I took the photo above and the photo below, the sleet had begun. Ah, well, gardens are still gardens, even in the sleet and wind. 🙂
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. 🙂
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 :-).
Yes, the gates to Vondelpark can be closed, as I learned to my … surprise, chagrin and / or shock … the day of and the day after one of the major spring storms that knocked down trees. Unless one climbed over fences, stone walls, or gates such as these, one could not enter the park for a day or two. Gasp.
Trying to enjoy Vondelpark and all my other urban-garden walks as much as possible while there are still leaves on the trees, especially since those leaves are changing color daily 🙂
Same walk as the last entry: you get a sense why this is one of my favorite walk routes when the sun is shining, I trust? On the last warm swimmy day of August or early September, I followed a tennis outing (my club courts are a short bike ride behind and right, from the perspective of the photo above) with a swim on the far shore of this lake…but though we did see a few natives swimming on this outing, my bones would find the wind and air temperatures much too cold to brave those waters any more. We’re looking north across Nieuwe Meer, from the edge of Amsterdamse Bos, for anyone who wants to map-check any of it.
Back to the Bosbaan in Amsterdamse Bos on a lovely early-autumn evening. Note the moon just below the airplanes’ approach path to Schiphol, in the photos below. A well-placed bench allows one not only to contemplate the moon, the sky, the trees, the planes and the Bosbaan (the forest water track or water course, I guess) itself, but also to rest the weary legs.
Foreground, behive; background, stork on nesting platform. At least, I think it’s a stork but maybe different migratory birds use those platforms at different times. That’d be a smartly-adaptive Dutch approach to supporting migratory bird populations in the midst of probably the most famous park in the nation…
(so much world, so little time....) 