These are all of Erasmus Park, a smaller park which is mostly on an island created by – you guess it – the Erasmus canal. All taken on the 7th of January, one of the first reasonably sunny and clear days we’d had for several months. Below and right you’ll see the standing water which, there and other parts of town, is still standing. Everything feels waterlogged and muddy, even now when the rain hasn’t been quite so constant…
One of the big summer storms knocked down a few trees around town including this one in a park next to our office. Gallery below…every remaining A’dam 2023 photo with significant greenery in it 🙂
I had every intention of getting back to photograph these lovely alleys of trees a bit later as the color of the leaves advanced further. Then we had weeks of rain that detracted from trying to take photos along with knocking off all the leaves. Oh, well – next year.
Indeed any time I’m desperate for an island to fill a slot in this particular series (it happens – remember this one?), my life got **way** easier when I moved into this place. There are two islands visible from this vantage in my current home: both are around the middle of the image, near the far shore of Sloterplas, which is the name of this lake. The closest one is immediately in front of the large lighted building above, which happens to be the swimming complex where the Dutch national team trains. Above was a pre-sunrise full moon in late September; just below dawn clouds the morning after the beautiful sunset at the bottom.
Sunset from my apartment on my birthday, just over a month ago, was pretty much a full two hours later than it is already now :-(. That’s the seasons here…
August is Pride Month in Amsterdam, so we wandered up there to see things at the end of the Pride Parade a few weeks ago. The first time this post went up, a glitch deleted the sadder gallery below, one of those reasons I’m so happy to now live in a place where I can be more fully myself :-).
These shots were all taken in Beatrixpark, south and east of where I used to live. We wandered over there in order to see more delegations in the festive starting parade for the Amsterdam World Gymnaestrada 2023 two weekends ago. It’s apparently a non-competitive gymnastics gathering that began here in A’dam 70 years ago (?), and aside from watching the flags and seeing which ones we recognized, we enjoyed seeing how much fun the highly diverse (in age most notably) the walkers were having with each other and the event. African, Asian and South American nations were generally less represented than European nations, but I was happy to see Zimbabwe bringing up the end of the alphabet, just before the very large Netherlands contingent, who as host country were the last delegation. It was also fun to note the occasional country that snuck in out of alphabetical order – generally more fun and less formal than you’ll see on TV with things like the Olympics :-).
Two early-morning views from my new place (just moved, middle of the week past) – above, looking north from my bedroom and below looking west from my living room. We’ve shown you Sloterplas, the lake below, in this previous post as well as a few others. You’ll be seeing more of this, and much less of my last neighborhood park going forward 🙂
Buiksloterbreek Park, in a part of Noord Amsterdam that I hadn’t previously visited. (In case you’d like an orientation linked to past posts: north of the Ij, to the right and in this case further west i.e. farther away from where these photos from Muziekgebouw and Bimhuis were taken.)
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. 🙂
(so much world, so little time....) 