This year’s edition of the light festival opened a few days ago, and I took these photos of one beautiful entry during my bike ride to the office the prior week, as the various light sculptures were being installed. Eager to see the rest as soon as I can get out for a cruise :-).
I’ve decided to begin the new year with a first entry celebrating light in the darkness of winter. And to use up just about every remaining 2024 photo that could fit into this category all in one go, thus beginning what readers have termed my annual mad rush to empty my folders of last year’s photo before I take a blog break and then resume. Among the things you’ll see if you look for them in the gallery below are (light) pears in trees on Dam Square in the heart of the city; quite a few images from this year’s light festival (which include many showing a series called “moon rise,” as well as the one saying “closed until canals freeze over:” that’s art!); a view down one of the famous canal intersections in which you can see the arches of nine different bridges all lit up as that canal travels southward under other street bridges; and two specific photos looking out from my apartment, one of which shows a building lit as a Christmas Tree and another showing the early-morning deliver early last month of a truck bringing some absolutely massive construction equipment for the new high-rise apartment complex they’re building across the street from me. (Over my morning tea, I watched the drivers and lead trucks sort out how navigate the super long truck around the traffic circle below us, including at one point taking out and then putting back a road traffic sign. And lots of other impatient cars turning and around going back the wrong way, which they could get away with b/c of how early it was.)
Amsterdam’s annual winter light festival along the canals opened last week, so I’ve begun seeing them on my evening and morning bike commutes. We’ve shared many festival sculptures with you in the past. (If you view full version, select the label “winter lights” which you ‘ll see below in this post itself, and many will be from this lights festival.) I’ll be interested if any of the light sculptures this year will surpass what my favorite from the three years I’ve so far been enjoying this festival :-).
These are all taken from the same spot and same time as the second photo in the post just below. Above, looking north from Dam Square along Damrak; next, looking east to the monuments on Dam Square & the lovely Dam Straatjes lights in the heart of the Grachtengordel in central A’dam; and at the bottom, looking south along Rokin, which is the name they call Damrak Street once it gets south of Dam Square. All taken during a short break from the rain during my bike ride to the office earlier this week.
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.
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.
Funchal really does Christmas lights in a big, big way. Notice the lighter blue lights in the peaked roofs on this waterfront cafe, just above? Those are volcanoes erupting, and though I tried, I couldn’t get the video to upload well nor did it really show the eruptions well enough to bother… Last holiday-lights show from Funchal here, and then some from Amsterdam next, which as you may recall from many posts last year does its own winter lights quite nicely :-).
Here you see the Jardim Municipal da Funchal in all its Christmas splendor. This is also where we watched Portugal play its last two world cup matches; the daytime shot below was from that match they lost to Morocco, while the evening shot was the prior match where they beat Switzerland in the round of 16… :-). FYI Cristiano Ronaldo is from Madeira, hence the thought it would be good to watch on the public screen in the heart of town.
This, dear friends, brings us to the end of the photos of the festival of light. Check out my first such post for more info about the festival, and consider visiting Amsterdam for a future edition of the festival!
Here you see the Jardim Municipal da Funchal in all its Christmas splendor. This is also where we watched Portugal play its last two world cup matches; the daytime shot below was from that match they lost to Morocco, while the evening shot was the prior match where they beat Switzerland in the round of 16… :-). FYI Cristiano Ronaldo is from Madeira, hence the thought it would be good to watch on the public screen in the heart of town.
(so much world, so little time....) 