I'm back for a visit in Holland. My daughter commissioned me to take an artsy photo of a very common sight here: bicycles! So far I haven't succeeded. It's not that there aren't enough bikes. Believe me: there are! It's feeling the pressure to create something stunning and possibly overthinking it.
Yesterday I decided to try my luck in Rotterdam, the city where I was born and home of the very best Dutch soccer club Feyenoord. I thought that for sure there'd be many bicycles at the train station "Centraal Station". When I got there I saw a brand new, ultra modern, striking building but NO bikes! That just couldn't be right!
I walked around the building and definitely saw many people with bicycles. What did they do with them? Curious now, I followed them to this escalator specifically designed for bicyclists.
And the mystery was solved. I had never seen this before: an entire, huge space devoted to a bicycle-parking-garage with numbered lanes, arrows, mirrors, signs stating number of free spaces and two-tier bicycle racks.
It was an amazing sight!
I spent a wonderful day photographing the rest of Rotterdam. Unfortunately I still haven't produced a beautiful, artsy photo of bicycles for my daughter to put on the wall of her new apartment. Unless she thinks this will do:
