Photoblog: Photo #4
I just realised that I hadn’t posted a panorama on this blog. There was a time when you’d take multiple images and then stitch them up in Photoshop but these days most cameras make it very easy to get a panorama straight out of the camera. iPhone does a decent job of it and here is my attempt at capturing the area from Muntplein to the NH Doelen Hotel in one sweeping panorama. You can click on the photo to see a larger version.
Photoblog: Photo #3
The conical tower in the center of this picture used to be a part of a fortress wall that once surrounded Amsterdam. Netherlands emerged as a shipping powerhorse in the 17th century and Amsterdam was a bustling port. Given the perils of a long journey by sea in those days (if plague or pirates didn’t get you, bad weather would), it’s understandable why the loved ones of a merchant or a sailor leaving on a voyage would be a little forlorn at his departure. The tale I’ve heard as a tourist (and is corroborated by a plaque on the tower) is that since this tower offered a view of the harbour, the wives and mothers of the crew of the departing ship would congregate here and wave a tearful farewell. This story has earned this tower the appellation of ‘Schreiers Toren’ (Wailing Tower)
Photoblog: Photo #2
Selectively quoting Beatles lyrics to go with the picture:
You and I have memories
Longer than the road that stretches out ahead
Two of us wearing raincoats
Standing solo
In the sun
You and me chasing paper
Getting nowhere
On our way back home
We’re on our way home
We’re on our way home
We’re going home
Photoblog: Photo #1
While the long-form travel related posts will continue, I wanted to start posting some pictures that don’t have a story or other thematically similar pictures to go with them. Most of them are going to be from Amsterdam (and from my phone, which is incidentally about the only camera I am using these days). I am looking to get at least 2 photos a week out. But we’ll see — no pressure.
Besides being biker friendly, Amsterdam is a very pet friendly city too. It’s often both at the same time as the sight of a biker walking a dog on the leash is all too common here. It might sound cruel, but from the look of it both parties seem to enjoy it. As is bound to happen in a busy city, the pets get lost sometimes. It breaks my heart to see posters announcing someone’s pet going missing. The posters follow more or less the same template:
VERMIST
[insert cute photo of dog/cat]
Name of the dog Contact details of the owner
We’d seen these posters about a cute dog called Poppy around central station. Turns out that they were a publicity campaign for the British film Sightseers:
Marken’s wintery landscape
We had last visited Marken over a year ago in summer. Despite having endured a particularly cold and long winter this year, I didn’t expect Marken to have changed much with the season. I was, of course wrong; but the scale of how wrong I was surprised me. Within 20 minutes of leaving Amsterdam and crossing the underground IJ tunnel, you find yourself in a landscape that bears little resemblance to the city you left behind. There were swamps and open fields all around us. We saw canals where the water was mostly frozen. A light fog seemed to be a natural part of the air’s constitution here.
A thin strip of road connects Marken to the mainland. When looking out at the vast stretch of water from the buswindow you feel small and inconsequential.
We spent most of the day walking around the island amidst this surreal, desolate landscape.
The fog blurred the horizon and you couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began.
It was all very still and silent. Loud squeals of ducks and swans would occasionally echo through this landscape. The only sign of being close to the civilisation was the drone of an airplane that flew over the clouds unseen (and the 5 bars of signal on my cellphone).
Markemeer, the vast lake surrounding the island, was partly frozen. During our last visit, sailboats of various sizes and vintages were flitting about, but this time we only saw small upturned boats moored on the slope of the dike that encloses the island.
This lot looked like a school of dead porpoises:
The lighthouse at Marken looked like it was out of a watercolour and would dissolve into Markemeer if you blinked.
The little sand beach around the lighthouse looked frozen in time. The snow on the sand looked like foam from a wave crashing on the shore.
A tractor that was probably carrying supplies for the repair of the lighthouse stood there abandoned. It looked quite majestic in this setting.
As we walked back to the bus stop, we were spooked a little by this mannequin keeping a watch on a patch of vegetation growing inside an old boat left in a field - not quite where you’d expect to find a boat or a mannequin. (‘A mannequin guarding a patch of vegetation inside an old boat’ sounds like the title of a Dali painting).
More snow in Amsterdam
It’s been snowing on and off in Amsterdam for the past few days. The temperature has been above 0ºC for the most part so the snow hasn’t really settled down. Near our house are two parallel bridges. One of them is a rail bridge while the other carries vehicular traffic. There is a huge gap between the two and you can see snowflakes fall through the gap. On a still day like today, they seem to fall in slow motion but when a train passes by their motion becomes confused and hurried. I’ve stood here watching the snow many times and felt completely mesmerised. On such occasions, Èric Satie’s first Gymnopédie plays in my head.
Today I put it all together in a video (turn up the volume a little or plug in the headphones):