I’ve pondered starting a new series called “transport choices” but just don’t think it’ll ever be visually stimulating enough to get me going or keep your eyes. This would be a good example: a Guardian article sent by a friend a a couple years back told me about this underground & underwater bike parking garage next to Amsterdam Centraal. Various articles on the Dutch (and in particular Amsterdam) choice to seriously invest in bike, foot and public transit infrastructure over and above car infrastructure strike a tone of mixed admiration and derision, I find – and this article was no exception. Having used this precise bike garage now multiple times to conveniently convey myself and my tennis-bag via bike to Centraal, drop the bike in a clean, safe, dry, attended underground lot for a cheap daily rate after the first free 24 hours and then simply walk up the stairs on the other side then directly into the station, I’ll say this use of my tax dollars is a far more welcome use than nearly all the uses my US tax dollars go for. Yeah, that’s my bike in its little spot before one of my Berlin trips this year. The Dutch deride me for my helmet, but I’m as impervious to that as I am to American derision for this fabulous parking alternative.
At 8:22 on the morning of the solstice, the streets were nearly empty because the new corona measures included an early start to school holidays. (So no kids and parents biking to school together – there’ll be a post about that at some point; family values here in NL mean that commuting to work on school days for me means seeing all the parents biking their kids to school before they bike themselves to work.) A good thing, because standing while waiting for the lights to change and the usual backup of bikes at the main intersections would have made me even colder than I already was. On this shortest day of the year there were something like 7 hours and 44 minutes during which the sun was actually above the horizon: when this photo and the one in tomorrow’s post were taken, it has not yet graced us with its rays. But as you’ll see in our final post of the year (it’ll go up on my Friday morning), although its visit was very short on this particular day, the sun was very generous and kind to Amsterdam on the solstice this year. We’ll close out this funky year on the blog with three odes to a lovely city on a clear day :-).
(so much world, so little time....) 