Posts tagged “Dutch Rivers & Canals

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With this winter-sunset view of the Amstel in the heart of my adopted home city of Amsterdam, I leave all you dear readers for some undetermined period of time and complete my 365 days of at-least-one-post-per-day. I expect to be back in a few months — and any comments, post-views, or requests for less or more of this or that type of post in the interim may help guide me when I start the next chapter.

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Taken at the same time and same place as our last post, this time looking south along the Amstel with the sky lightening to the east.

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A brief stop on the magere brug (thin bridge) over the Amstel, on an extremely rare clear morning bike ride to work last week. We’re looking north along the Amstel towards the building which houses the National Ballet & Opera, plus city hall for A’dam, with the moon setting off the the west.

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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. 🙂

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One of my favorite light sculptures from this year’s edition of the Amsterdam Light Festival, which this year I did by boat. Last year we were in lockdown, so no boat tours were possible, now that I know where to find them all, I can go back see some of my favorites again from the banks of the canals instead of from a moving boat :-). The building behind it is the Amstel Hotel, apparently the first hotel in Europe to be electrified, if I understood what the boat tour guide told us.

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…like I said, then it got warmer and there has been precious little blue sky since…

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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.

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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.

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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 :-).

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Still working through photos of the flat and canal-rich countryside of Noord-Holland, Gelderland and Noord-Brabant in NL, even as I enjoy the steep hills and Atlantic views in Madeira. So much world, indeed…

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