Amsterdam

An over night stop - with 10:00 kebab for dinner and an early morning walk before walking to the train station was our quick taste of Amsterdam.

We stayed in a beautiful neighborhood, the Jordaan, near the Anne Frank House.  Anne heard the bells of Westerkerk sing the hours from her hiding place just a couple of doors down the street. 

Rembrandt knew this neighborhood with it's canals and tall narrow buildings.

You can't see it very well, but each house has an apparatus at the center top to help move things to the upper floors.  Bringing things in through the window is much better than going up those small stairways.  Some of the houses are a little tipped out at the top.  I suppose to protect the windows as things are hoisted up.

 

Rembrandt lived before Amsterdam became a bicycle haven.  We saw people in those early morning hours heading to work on their bikes along the narrow lanes that are only wide enough for one car.  There were cars parked along the way, but many more bikes than cars.  We saw into a downstairs bike garage

The train station had a double decker bike garage with hardly a car insight.  And the train ride to and from the airport was amazingly smooth and easy.  This three wheeled truck was about the right size for the streets

Street Markets

We found a little street market for fresh produce one day in Prague.  There was a little street fountain to wash the pears we bought and we enjoyed them with the bread and cheese we had purchased in a metro stop store.

 They had charming wooden toys.

It would be a happy kid with an indulgent mother if these were purchased- they were huge gummy candies.

And visited a regular open air market in Lviv.  They sell coins, Soviet memorabilia...., door knobs....

crafts.....

traditional embroidery....

The bored jewelry sellers play chess.

Street Scenes

This post will be a collection of street scenes.  I didn't take very many pictures of people.  It feels instrusive and most of the people we saw in Prague and Cracow were also probably tourists - not local color.


The squares and the main pedestrian streets were home to people trying to entertain and earn a little money.  Guitar players and breakdancers.  These two guys were my favorites.  The first delighted the children with his ability to keep the ball moving with various parts of his body, but no hands. 

This one kept the children happy with enormous bubbles that they chased and popped.  It was fun to watch the moms come up with their kids and put some coins in his urn and let their kids go.  One rather tall momma helped her "smaller than the other kids" daughter pop a few bubbles before taking her away.

Of course there were plenty of pigeons.  Nate calls them flying rats.  Some are pretty bold.  We were having our granola bars (aka emergency food to get you to the end of the exhibit) and some tried to land in our laps.  The little boy in the picture below was feeding them with the crumbs from a pretzel stand until his momma pulled him away.  You can see that he wasn't quite ready to go.  In Lviv there was a lady the pigeons seemed to know.  They flocked around her as she walked past us and when she was a little ways away she released the bag of crumbs she carried.  The pigeons left little evidence of her passage.

There were plenty of charming windows fitted with white lace curtains and or flower boxes.

As well as some creative displays of flowers

Advertising wasn't always what you would expect - as these women of "substance" illustrate...

But there were celebrity endorsements, even in Poland.

In Lviv, the notables of ancient times were recast in traditional dress









In Everett this year, they have artist painted working pianos on the streets.  In Prague they have painted non-working pianos honor a Chopin anniversary.

This is a Polish style street sign.












Open air cafes were everywhere.  I wonder if they have to rent their sidewalk space?  Although the cafes allow for smoking diners, they also allow for fresh air on a hot day. 

Art shows up in surprising places, cement trucks, manhole covers and the inside shutters of market stalls.

The old and the new find themselves at home together.

Wawell Hill Castle - Cracow

Beautiful details everywhere. 

The foundations of a church that formerly stood in this spot.  There were several churches built on Wawell Hill over a span of centuries.

Stone Carving of King David

This beautiful renaissance courtyard was one of the most beautiful spaces we saw. 

The Horse Chestnut is loved by Slavic people.  This one is ironwork at Wawell Hill.  We saw them on the street, suffering from either a blight or the record breaking heat of earlier weeks this summer.  We also saw the motif on plastic bags at the airport in Kyiv. 

If you can't get them to church because of religious feeling, maybe curiosity will draw them in.  These large bones from an unknown source have hung outside this cathedral for many years.

The Lavra

One of the big sites in Kyiv is the Lavra.  Part of the Lavra is owned by the government and part by the church.  It is a complex of many churches.  We did not begin to see it all.  You pay to enter the part owned by the government.  Some of the parts owned by the church are open to visitors, but they expect you to remember that they are a place of worship.  Women need to wear a headscarf to visit the interiors of the churches.  Old women sell them on the street outside, if you don't have one.  One part of the Lavra called "the caves" women are required to wear skirts.  They will rent you one for about $1 if you aren't wearing one.  This area is where the original monks lived and died.  They have some underground churches and burial chambers.  Many devout women visit these caves and churches.

The gate is itself a church.  You can see the archway of the gate at the bottom of the picture.
The church you see straight ahead of you as you walk in the gate is a reconstruction.

Inside it you also find another church - a church within a church.

Both churches were orginially build with layers of bricks and mortar and fieldstone.

This large bell is topped by four figures.  Depicted are the head of the eagle, the head of the ox and the head of the lion.  Can you figure out what the fourth head is? 

St. Michael's with the striped gold and green domes allows, for a fee, photographs.  It is dark and the photos don't really do it justice.  It was beautiful.  Every surface, save one was decorated or painted.  Some of the painting is more decorative, some symbolic and some is pictoral.  I wish I had tried to take pictures of every motif.  They were all so beautiful.

This is Peter having swum to shore to great the resurrected Lord.















The caves were originally founded near a source of water, some springs.  People still come to get water from these springs.