The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Filled-in windows. Sometimes I think the designers of the building wanted uniformity, even if some of the openings were never going to be used as windows. But sometimes it really looks like windows that were filled in. I really don’t know why.

Bridge views. Some bridges are big enough that you don’t even notice them as a bridge, just a road or tram line. But some are pretty nice to look at.

Building down into the water. Or maybe, letting the water rise up your walls. If you come visit, I’m happy to take you to the little restaurants that are on the water’s edge that you can see in the photo on the left. The view from the white spot is the photo at the bottom.

House plaques. If you look closely enough, you can find a variety of them on the canal houses. You can even buy photos of them from this site. They usually represent what the house was originally used for, or what the owner’s profession was. Although I suspect are just nice pieces of art too.

I think just about every house in Amsterdam was originally built for some reason, but over a few hundred years I guess that’s about to happen. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam#Architecture for more about that. Today’s photo is of a building (or 3) that were built to store spices, probably brought to Amsterdam by the Dutch East India Company.

I think all of the houses on the canals in Amsterdam have some sort of ornate front, with a façade of some sort at the top. Notice how you can see through the window at the top of one of these.

It’s time for another round of photos, which is my form of an art project. This time, we have interesting things to notice about the housing in the heart of Amsterdam around the canals. We start with some of the very skinny houses, or at least sections of houses. I’ve never gone through one of the doors for these, but I’d hope that the home is only as wide as a single door. I’m sure it’s not, but it looks like it from the street.

Near the Amsterdam Zuid station. 

This is more nerdy stuff related to my job….

This video is a set of individual images captured by one of our Dove satellites. The Dove was travelling overhead at about seven kilometers per second (or 15,658 MPH) while it took pictures of the Soyuz rocket. The rocket hit around 1,200 mph one minute into its flight, which is about half the time of this video (so about 6 seconds of video). It was carrying 48 new Dove satellites for us. Click the image to watch the video or read more here.

Today when walking around Amsterdam, sweating, I remembered when my friend Jeff and I stepped out of the Bangkok airport in November 1997. It was the first time I’d really felt humidity just hit me. We walked out and I thought “oh, that’s what high humidity feels like”. We then took a taxi at crazy speeds down a freeway, but his speedometer said “0”; that’s a different story.

Relative Humidity in Bangkok in November is about 82%, which is still higher than the average of 72% in July in Amsterdam. Either one is too high for me!

If you’re wondering, the Relative Humidity % in July in Fargo is 55%, Seattle is 61%, maybe 68% in San Francisco, Salt Lake City is dry at 26%, and New York City is 57%.