Journey 01 · 52.3676° N, 4.9041° E
Amsterdam
- Season
- Late April, rain
- Stories
- Fourteen
- Walked
- 61 km
- Camera
- 35mm, one lens
Nine days of walking in a city built on patience. Scroll slowly — it was all slow.
- 01
- Brouwersgracht
- 06:40
- 8°C, drizzle
The first morning I got the hour wrong and arrived before the city did. For eleven minutes the whole canal belonged to a man sweeping a doorstep and to me, and neither of us said anything about it.
— he nodded at the water, as if introducing us
- 35mm · f/2 · 1/125
- 52.3823° N, 4.8873° E
- Frame 03 of roll one
- 35mm · f/4 · 1/250
- 02
- Haarlemmerstraat
- 17:20
- 11°C, clearing
Nobody here locks their bicycles.
Not quite true — everyone locks them, twice, with chains thick as an arm. But they leave them leaning against each other like a crowd waiting for something, and no one moves another person's bicycle. I counted forty-one in one railing before I lost the thread.
a city that parks by trust and steel, both
- Bicycles in Amsterdam
- ≈ 880,000
- People
- ≈ 920,000
- 35mm · f/2.8 · 1/160
- 35mm · f/2.8 · 1/250
- 03
- Egelantiersgracht
- 08:20
- 9°C, still
A woman on a stepladder was tying a branch back to itself with garden wire. She told me the tree outside number 12 flowers for four days and then gives up for a year, and that she has photographed all four days every spring since 1998. I asked if the pictures were different. She said only the light.
twenty-seven springs, same branch
- 04
- Prinsengracht
- 11:15
- 10°C, wind
Kees has lived on the same twelve metres of water for thirty-one years. He has moved house four times, he says, because the water underneath him is never the same water twice.
he offered coffee before he offered his name
- 35mm · f/5.6 · 1/500
- 52.3667° N, 4.8830° E
- Frame 19 of roll two
05 · Overheard · Sluis Amstel · 14:05
“A canal is only a street that remembers where the water went.”
- 06
- Moving image
- Reguliersgracht
- 19:50
00:15 · silent
Byte 06
It rained for nine of my nine days. On the last evening I stopped hiding from it and stood under a bridge for a quarter of an hour, listening to a city being tapped on.
- 35mm · f/2 · 1/60
- Frame 04 of roll four
- 07
- Lindengracht
- 07:15
- 7°C, wet
Forty loaves every morning, and then the day is over.
The bakery on the corner sells forty loaves and closes. Not forty and then some — forty. I asked the baker why he wouldn't make sixty. He looked at me the way you look at someone who has asked why they don't play the second half of a song twice.
"then it would be a factory, and I would be tired"
- 08
- Listen
- Westermarkt
- 18:00
The bells count the hour and the rain keeps time underneath them. Turn the ambience on and read the rest of this journey with the weather I had.
headphones, if you have them
- 09
- Keizersgracht
- 20:40
- 12°C, clear
Nobody closes their curtains here. You walk past a hundred lit rooms in an evening: a man reading, a table being laid, a cat losing an argument with a lamp. It is not showing off. It is just an old agreement that light is for sharing.
I looked at all of them and photographed none
- 35mm · f/4 · 1/320
- 35mm · f/4 · 1/320
- 10
- Herengracht
- 16:58 → 17:01
- 13°C
The street was silent until exactly five, and then it wasn't. Two frames, three minutes apart. Everyone leaves at once here, as if the whole city keeps one clock and nobody wants to be the one who cheats it.
11 · From the notebook
- Local saying
- "Doe maar normaal." Just act normal. It is advice, a compliment and a warning, depending on the eyebrow.
- Interesting fact
- The whole city stands on wooden piles driven into sand. Eleven million trees, holding up the ground floor.
- Hidden tip
- Walk the Zeedijk before seven. The fish market opens with a bell and closes before most people have eaten.
- 35mm · f/2.8 · 1/200
- 12
- Amstel
- 09:30
She has fed the same family of coots for twenty-two years.
Not the same birds, she explained — coots don't last that long — but the same family, at the same corner, at half past nine. She knows which ones are related by the way they refuse to share. Her husband started it. He has been gone eleven years and the coots still come.
"somebody has to keep the appointment"
- 13
- Bloemgracht
- 22:15
- 11°C, dry at last
On the last night four strangers made room for me at a table meant for four. There is a word for it here that nobody could translate for me without using their hands.
gezelligheid — closer to warmth than to fun
- 14
- IJ
- 06:05
- Last frame
I took the last picture from the ferry and it is almost nothing: white sky, grey water, one gull leaving the frame. It is the one I keep.
Journey completed
Nine days, fourteen stories
- Distance walked
- 61 km
- Frames exposed
- 211
- Coffee shops
- 17
- Hidden gems
- 6
- Rain, days of
- 9
- Favourite moment
- Eleven minutes alone on Brouwersgracht with a man sweeping a doorstep.
- Best food
- Loaf number thirty-eight, eaten on a bollard, still too hot.
Next destination
Bangkok → Chiang Mai
Follow the monsoon