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 :-).
Here’s to a Happy New Year 2022. This is probably me signing off for a while despite a remaining queue of lovely canal and urban-garden images. Look forward to them once 2022 has shown us more of itself. 🙂
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 :-).
This atmospheric and lovely sculpture, composed of blue glass beads from the Caribbean-Island Dutch territory of St Eustatius, is part of an exhibit entitled Sklavernij (in English, Slavery) at the Rijksmuseum. Many layers to such a lovely museum, initially constructed I would assume with a good contribution of the wealth that came from the trade in sugar, spices … and humans. About the blue glass beads, two different stories about them can be found here and here; the latter burying past pain, current racism and discrimination, and their meaning for all of us now; the former exploring the them more. The museum tells a story similar to the first link, fyi.
