Weekend Reflections

Last weekend we had unusual wonderful warm weather along the Gooi-lake. But temperatures have tumbled down now to 9 degrees C (48.2F), so no sitting along the waterfront this weekend.

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Skywatch Friday

Spring is coming very soon with this chestnut tree.

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Splash

Both love the fountain.

There are not so many fountains in Amsterdam, here in front of the Americain Hotel at the Leidsesquare was since 1965 a fountain which was a bit old and deteriorated. The founder of the Scapino Ballet troup, Miss Hans Snoek had after her death in 2001,  left a legacy to the citycounsel to make a new fountain at this place. At June 12th 2006 a complete new fountain was placed which is now called the "Hans Snoek fountain".

Chilling in the parc

We still have beautiful weather, this was yesterday in the afternoon in the Vondelparc in Amsterdam.

Everybody came straight from school to the parc to get some sunshine. It was 20 degrees C (68F)

The heron is looking to all the flow in his parc.

Taphophile Tragics # 14

This is a little cemetery from 1670 near the Jan Mabie House, the oldest house still standing in the Mohawk Valley in the US. The graves must be of the residents of the house during the centuries, I only could decode 1790 on a grave, the others are hardly visible.

The 300 year old Dutch farm was originally settled by Daniel Janse van Antwerpen, who established it as a fur trading post to meet Native American traders before they reached Schenectady. He received a deed for the property in 1671 from the English governor. In 1706, Van Antwerpen sold the farm to Jan Pieterse Mabie and it was handed down through the Mabie family for 287 years.

This is my contribution to Taphophile Tragics

Enjoying the weekend

The motorclub.

Two friendly men in their Morgan.

And the runner, he is not running over water but on a path along the waterside.

Sunday Bridges

This road is called the "four bridges path" a cycling route in Almere.

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Nature

With the warm weather we like to bike around as here in the environment of Almere. With the leaveless trees it is weird to have such warm weather. Nature is not yet ready to burst open.

I have seen shoes on a wire, but not nailed to a tree, don't know what the message is, probable only a lost shoe.

I always feel a bit sad to see so many trees cut down in our little wood. This one was 36 years old.

Summer shoes

With the nice temperatures we have at the moment 19.5 degrees C (66.2F), we have broken the record since 1936 March 22. I know for some of the overseas this is peanuts, but our spring has only started for two days and suddenly the sun shines the whole day. So we get some summer feelings to change clothes and shoes altough I don't see myself in these pink and blue at the market.

At least the prices are low.

Rubbish

A rather sloppy streetcorner in Amsterdam. Somebody tried to brighten up the street with some green and hung a request not to put your bike against it. So a bike is put against it as everybody does here.

If you want to learn dutch you know where to go now and have a coke with it.

Streetview

Back to modern times with a carrier cycle to transport the children.

Reading and writing

After the succes of yesterdays post I continue with the nostalgic museum. The school in the thirties or fourties I think as I watch the teacher. My mother looked that way too when she was a teacher at that time.

It was possible to write some text down with a crown pen and ink. I learned writing this way when I was six years old.

The last line is mine. I learned it this way but I don't write so proper anymore.

We learned reading with the help of this board with moveable characters. Everyone at that time could recite these words from the head. I can't remember how we learned reading with this, but I did obviously.

Do you remember these? We now mostly write with machines.

Museum of the 20th Century

I visited the museum in Hoorn which shows how we lived in  the past century. It was a kind of nostalgic travel through my own life as there were interiors of dutch houses, which all looked so familiar to me. This one is from the fourties how my grandparents lived.

The fifties when the first tv's arrived. This is what I remember of my own childhood. We didn't have the tv yet but the dinnertable with the white tablecloth and the tableware are quite the same.

This is at my parents home. I am in the middle with two friends and my father at my 16th birthday at the dinnertable as above.

In the sixties I had a simular chair and table made of rattan in my own girls room.

In the seventies we got married, we had a lot of orange and brown in our interior, but not so hysterical  like this. But I must admit that the plates for the fondue set are still in my cupboard.

I am afraid I am ready for a museum....

This was in our first home in 1970. Hairy SC with tobacco pipe, my friend Ava and I had dinner with cheese fondue.

Starbucks

Americans have discovered Amsterdam. After the opening of the "biggest" Apple store in Europe, we now have the "biggest" Starbucks cafe in Europe. I don't know if we really must be happy with it. One of the most awful things in the US is a coffee in a paper cup in which you can see the bottom. We call that "ditchwater". The only time we had a rather nice coffee there was in a Starbucks cafe I must admit. But to open such a big american cafe in the centre of  Amsterdam is rather pretentious as we have so many very good cafes to serve a coffee.

This was the opening day and it was so crowded, there was a queque outside, everybody wanted to have a look. The cafe is situated below streetlevel in a former safe of a bankbuilding. I read an article in the newspaper that Starbucks had made an analysis about the dutch way of drinking coffee for a year! The conclusion is they decided to serve the coffee not only in paper cups but also in real cups, to make a long table in the middle where people can chat with each other. They made Delft Blue tiles at the pillars and a wall with inner tubes of bikes. Everybody happy?

Lamp post

Made me laugh when I passed this lamp post.

Skywatch Friday

Yesterday we had a beautiful warm day 20 degrees C! (68F). We went out biking and I spotted this person high in the sky. I thought it was a parachute but it didn't came down and I heard a motor. I had never seen this before so I googled a bit and it is "Powered Paragliding" (PPG). You have a backpack motor connected to a big spinning propeller. Look here how it looks like.

See for more skywatches here

Fashionable

Doesn't she looks great?

Exciting Amsterdam

It is almost Easter and Amsterdam is ready to welcome the tourists. Put your survival shoes on!

No tramway here, these works always takes months in Amsterdam, the street looks like this from 12 january.

Taphophile Tragics # 12

In 2009 I visited the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, NY.  The president is buried here on the family estate Springwood in the Rose Garden together with his wife Eleanor.

In the garden is a lovely sculpture of the two, Franklin was born in 1882 and died in 1945, Eleanor was born in 1884 and died in 1962. He was the 32-nd president of the US from 1933-1945.

The family home of Franklin.

 In 1921 Franklin felt ill with poliomyelitis which paralysed his lower torso. He had to use a wheelchair and for that reason another house was built on the estate which had no stairs. The museum is in here and is very interesting with all kind of personal things and the original decorated rooms. Have a look here.

This is my contribution to Taphophile Tragics

Monday Mural

This tile painting I saw in the "Leiden-street" in  Amsterdam. Christiaan Huygens  (1629-1695) was a prominent Dutch mathematician, astronomer, physicist and horologist. His work included early telescopic studies elucidating the nature of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan, the invention of the pendulum clock and other investigations in timekeeping, and studies of both optics and the centrifugal force.

I have no idea why his portrait is on this facade, I couldn't find any connection with Amsterdam. He was born and lived in the Hague and studied in Leiden. Maybe the name of the street?

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Sunday Bridges

I have seen many strange vehicles in the Amsterdam canals but a floating bus I hadn't seen before. This one looks like a normal bus just splashed in the water. I have done this once in the US and found it a rather scary expierence to drive into the water from the road. However that bus was a combination of a bus on a boat and didn't looked like a real bus so much.

This one is different and looks even more scary. I read you can make a tour with this one from the airport Schiphol when you have a long transfer and you don't want to hang around there but want to see the city. So you can drive under the Skinny Bridge with a bus!

See for more Sunday Bridges here

 

Here you see the testdrive/float.

Guess what

What do you think this is, many people call it "the bath tub".

It is the new expansion of the "Stedelijk Museum" (Museum for Modern Art) in Amsterdam which you can see on the left. We have waited for eight! years to see the result, all those years the museum has been closed and it still is. Maybe I am a pessimist but I think this is a rather dominant addition to the old building.

From this side it looks a lot better, when you don't see the other (old) buildings. They plan to open the museum september 2012, we keep our fingers crossed.

Apple Store

This week Apple has opened their first Flagship Store in Amsterdam at the "Leidsesquare". The impressive  building used to be a fashion-palace "Hirsch & Cie" for the upper ten from 1912-1976. In the seventies it had to close because younger people didn't want to wear the "old-fashioned" clothes. A Bank has used the building until 2011 when Apple started to renovate the inside.

The famous glass stairs,  but they had to remove a part of the floor to get a vide.

When it opened last saturday there was a huge queue around the building, but at a weekly day it was a bit quiet.

They tried to keep some old elements as the pilars and illumination equipement with copper, but I am not sure I like the result.