Small Wonders.101
Tulips & Canals – Spring Jaunts in Amsterdam
Sorry for the lag between posts, folks. I went offline for June and July, and hung out on the bike trails and tennis courts at home. I’m back on a short assignment again now (Sierra Leone until early September), and this means bike trails and tennis courts aren’t as readily available, so I’m using my evening & weekend free time to dig through all the photos I’ve taken since leaving Haiti & Canada (see my last posts)…and I’ll be slowly popping them up here for your enjoyment. This one’s Amsterdam: I’m usually there once or twice a year, before or after an assignment, for meetings and briefings and so on. I got lucky with an unusually sunny weekend in the middle of this particular stay, so I walked and took trams around new parts of town I’d not previously visited. The spring tulips, flowering magnolia trees, and other signs of the season were lovely and everywhere, and I found Amsterdam’s range of architectural styles and details from classic big brick churches to modern apartment complexes, university classroom buildings, and even small historical plaques embedded in walls around town quite enjoyable. It’s really a city that rewards rambling down side streets with your eyes open and curiosity alive. And I finally found a way to try to show you how small some of the restaurant and hotel sinks can be in Amsterdam – I think this was in a new (for me) and excellent restaurant, and I found it unusually small even by Amsterdam standards…
Springtime in Virginia
My Mom just turned 80. Happy birthday, Mom! She’s often chosen springtime celebrations farther south — this time she was interested in springtime gardens of Virginia, along with Virginia’s colonial and civil war history. I flew up for a few days with her, my brothers and sister in law, and my aunt (Mom’s sister). Here are a bunch of shots that I figured I should put up right away while the memories are still fresh and folks further north – or going into southern autumn – can appreciate the beauty of tulips, dogwoods, redbuds and other flowers and trees. I’ve never really been to Richmond before – probably drove through once or twice, but never stopped. Lovely city, fairly messed up history – not a coincidence that the only two historical monuments I decided to photograph are ones celebrating great African-Americans and their achievements. ‘Nuf said. Still…pretty buildings, eh?
(so much world, so little time....) 