This one is a bit more obviously a little island; I’d just never noticed it before. These must be heaven for the birds and small mammals of our urban park, since no one boats and I’ve never seen people swim in these canals, and dogs only going in to retrieve sticks…
As I’ve mentioned, the blog in general and – more specifically – these numbered “series” that I’ve done the past few years tend to get me out the door, with an eye and mind open to something interesting or lovely (or both) in the physical world around me. Having launched this “Islands” series from my trip to Madeira last December, and being now in this numbers thing (a few of you may have noticed that I’ve gone sequential and numerically rhyming in the entries, to the extent manageable) …well, I needed to get more Islands to photograph! And it turns out I’ve already, unbeknownst to me, shown you any number of photos a few little islands in the ponds that adorn my beloved next-door park, good ol’ Vondelpark. That’s an island, behind the duck: who knew?!
It’s fun to create rules for oneself which give one the opportunity experience the world afresh, in a brief moment of pre-thunderstorm sun.
I created a tag called “graffiti art” years ago, I think when I visited Melbourne for the Australian Open in 2009. Recent days have given me opportunity to appreciate the differences between graffiti (art) styles in Amsterdam and SF – wait for some of my mural photos taken on my last morning in SF, and also for some I believe I got while I was up Eureka. 🙂
So yes, we landed early Tuesday in Amsterdam. While I was away, the crocuses faded, the leaves remained absent from the trees (though many are strongly in bud by now), and as you see in these photos taken while walking to stay awake, the tulips are coming into their season.
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. 🙂
Yes, the gates to Vondelpark can be closed, as I learned to my … surprise, chagrin and / or shock … the day of and the day after one of the major spring storms that knocked down trees. Unless one climbed over fences, stone walls, or gates such as these, one could not enter the park for a day or two. Gasp.
Trying to enjoy Vondelpark and all my other urban-garden walks as much as possible while there are still leaves on the trees, especially since those leaves are changing color daily 🙂
Foreground, behive; background, stork on nesting platform. At least, I think it’s a stork but maybe different migratory birds use those platforms at different times. That’d be a smartly-adaptive Dutch approach to supporting migratory bird populations in the midst of probably the most famous park in the nation…
(so much world, so little time....) 