This weekend

Spent this weekend with my friend Mark from England.  Stayed in Amsterdam on Friday night and this is the view from the hotel.
Houses on the edge of Vondelpark.  The sky is rarely this clear.


Royal Palace
Dam Square

One of the shopping centers had an enormous Christmas Tree inside.

Someone playing the piano beneath it.

View of the Rhine from the Veluwe ridge in the arboretum.
The Dutch water board at work on the flood plain.
View of the ridge where the river eroded it over time.  The factory in the distance is a paper mill that uses water power.
There is no bridge here, just a ferry.

Thanksgiving Dinner

Yum yum

Snow!

Got a very small amount of snow here the past two days.  Unfortunately it will probably be gone in a couple days as the temperatures go back into the 40s.

Class Excursions

Started a new semester and a new class here a few weeks ago and because it's a class about Dutch landscape architecture in particular, there have been lots of trips around the country.  First we went on a bicycle trip that lasted all day.  We went to see the different types of landscapes that are close by.  Then there was a bus trip along the Rhine river which forms a huge delta in the whole country, especially in the east where it meets the North Sea.  This week I went to Amsterdam for a group project to see an urban area and how it relates to the landscape.  On Wednesday was the last trip when we took a bus to Arnhem to see how a typical Dutch city evolved from its formation until now.  

Wooden shoes
This is the mill network at Kinderkijk-Elshout which is a UNESCO world heritage site.  
These windmills drain the peat areas which are then used for farms or villages.  They are from the 1700s.
This is the modern version.

Willow trees are cut like this because the branches were used for baskets and other things.

This is a new housing development in Amsterdam.  It is on the former port.








Arnhem has a park around the city in the place where a defense wall was during medieval times.




The hills in the background here are in Germany.