Branko's Weblog

Today it’s 24 degrees outside, but from what I understand the cloud cover that should be familiar by now to anyone’s who’s stayed in the city this summer will return tomorrow. The next time the sun will be back it will be autumn.

Happy discoveries on Queen’s Eve and Queen’s Day. Thanks to Natasha for pointing out the latter two.

On Queen’s Eve I was at bar Festina Lente where The Lovers from Sheffield, UK, were playing. The bar has a bench outside with a bronze statue of a faithful regular guest.

After the nation-wide Queen’s Day flee market, a lot of the wares on sale are left as garbage, such as these two copies of The Mark & Clark Band’s Double Take.

A book among shards of pottery titled The Arrangement.

I was on my way for a walk to the Amsterdamse Bos, when I thought “curses”, and turned around. The dreariness had gotten to me. Still got some photos though.

The bicycle tunnel at the court house:

Melting water brought out the colour on one side of this plane:

A dying daffodil in the snow. (Not shown here: the snow.) Same patch as last year.

Originally I wanted to hike the Amsterdamse Bos yesterday, but I left home late, and I feared I might not get out before dark. So instead I decided to walk towards the Amstelpark. There and back again taking the scenic route is a little over ten kilometers. You can walk this route through the green belt that divides the ever nearer growing cities of Amstermdam and Amstelveen. This belt is purposely kept open so that animals such as lizards, birds, and small mammals can still move around Amsterdam. Yesterday I chose a different route though, staying close to the highway for most of my walk.

This is the Zuidas (lit. South Axis), the belt of recent high-rises hugging the Southern part of the Amsterdam ringway. Lots of banks here, law firms, convention centers, and the World Trade Center.

Intermezzo: the Southern exit of the Amstelpark.

A menorah in a wall near the RAI convention center. I don’t know whether there was actually something there that the owners decided to rescue from the cold steel of the wrecking ball, or whether the wrecking crew decided to have a lark.

Same building.

Took a lunch break and my camera to the Van Tuyll – Van Serooskerkenplein. There was snow-like frilly stuff on all the traditionally green things, er, plants.

I haven’t been hiking for ages. Part of that was because I was busy with work; and on top of that, I tore a muscle in my left calf right after the last job. Scary business, because I did not know what was wrong. I wasn’t really feeling pain, I just could not fully develop my leg, and everytime I walked more than fifty meters (for instance if I went shopping), I’d break out in a sweat and start to limp.

The doctor didn’t sound like he was sure either, but he thought I probably had torn torn a muscle, and he said the condition could take up to six weeks to heal. In my case after four weeks everything already felt fine. So this weekend I decided to take a short walk to the nearby Beatrixpark and back.

The people of Amsterdam have locked up their boats for the winter. When it’s warm you can see boats full of bottles of rosé being sailed through the canals by half-drunk locals, but sailing truly is a summer sport here.

I am such a slow student of photography. Part of that is undoubtedly because I have no taste. It has taken me a while to realize that unsharp originals are just not acceptable. And part of the reason I have been taking so many unsharp photos is because this camera really needs a lot of light. Next time I am going to experiment some with using (improvised) camera stands and shorter exposure times. Today I used the flash. I hate the flash, but for the next photo I think it worked quite well, because it pulled the subject into the foreground.

Going home I came across this flower stand on the Olympiaplein. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flower stand with a see-through door before. It looks a bit like somebody left a teenage boy’s bedroom in the street. It reminded me of the large glass display cases a furniture store had out on the pavement in my city of birth. I used to fantasize about living in one of these.

Pictures I took in and around my office last April.

Back then I didn’t think anybody would want to see photos of the remains of fish fingers, but today I saw an arty photo of a blob of ketchup on a sink on a blog that seemed to suggest otherwise.

I packed some weight in my back-pack, because sometime this summer I will go hiking in the Ardennes, and I will be schlepping a dozen or so kilos worth of camping gear, food, drinks and clothes along. In other words: preparation time. I went for another walk through the Amsterdamse Bos, this one a bit shorter than last time, but still taking up well over three hours.

The stinging nettle. Hated for its sting, loved for its qualities as foodstuff and medicine. Distant relative of the equally hardy and useful marijuana. I am bit afraid to pick them in and around Amsterdam, because you never know who peed on them, making it quite a while since I have had nettle soup.

Sunlight reflecting off water onto the bottom of a bridge.

Ooh, I so hate these. Another accidental photo that I like. This time I was trying to take a picture of a very muddy stream, aiming at the point where it disappeared into the forest. When I got home I realised that sunlight projecting through the overhanging leaves turned the yellow-brown of the water into all kinds of green, giving the scene an emerald quality. This is a crop of that photo.

After a hiatus of a couple of weeks I went hiking again with my brother and his girlfriend. We took a short 10 mile walk south of a small picture postcard town just North of A’dam called Broek in Waterland, which is Dutch for “more water than even we consider healthy” (”broek” is pronounced “brook,” you figure out the rest).

Lots of birds and plants you can also find in the city, and some that you won’t such as buzzards and swallows.

Apparently Peter the Great stayed here once in a wooden house just like this (or perhaps exactly like this; we didn’t look very far).

In the next photo I enhanced the contrast a little. OK, a lot.

The bright colours on the next one are pretty much as they came off the camera. Most of the rest of the photos I took had a pretty strong blue colour cast, which I had to correct by hand, but this one was just fine and only required some local sharpening after the scaling down had blurred it.

I am not sure I managed to fix the blue colour cast on the next one, but I like the oily look.

Some more flowers.