Signs of Spring (but not tulips)

When you are living in a foreign country, what is initially new and exotic quickly becomes familiar. If you're not careful, you can forget to pay attention to what is different and therefore exciting or stimulating about this new place. Luckily, the changing season is providing me with new sights and discoveries that create the electric jolt I need to remember to look around -- take note -- consider -- wonder -- remember. Little things like, say, parrots in the trees.

At least I think they are parrots. They showed up about the time the cherry trees blossomed. I found this one busily eating flowers and tried to capture him with a blossom in his beak, but either I or the camera was too slow.

Bird life in general here in Amsterdam continues to surprise me. The first surprise was that herons, which I consider a rare and elusive sight at home, are everywhere. The canals provide them with great fishing opportunities, and they don't seem troubled by the proximity of pesky humans, even those with cameras.

I snapped this one in my neighborhood green spot, Sarphatipark. And believe me, I don't have much of a zoom (our best camera disappeared in The Great Rustenburgerstraat Car Break-In and I now use the kids' cameras). I was just about close enough to touch this guy.

While the herons look familiar -- I am not enough of a birder to know if we have the same species in North America -- spring has brought out lots of other water  birds I've never seen before: ducks with black bodies and white faces, all-black ducks with bright red beaks, giant, exotic-looking brownish ducks that the kids liken to wild turkeys. Of course, it stands to reason that the fauna would be different here from that back home, but somehow this has taken me by surprise.

By the same token, I did not realize that Amsterdam's latitude was considerably north of Columbus's.  So I was very surprised on arrival in January to find how much shorter the days were here. Mornings were terrible -- it didn't get light until about 8:30. Now that it's spring, things are back to what I consider normal. I'm told the days in summer will be delightfully long.

Another sign of spring is construction, and with it comes another of those little details of daily life that remind me that this is elsewhere: everywhere that dirt has been turned up, there are tiny seashells.

This photo was taken not at the beach but in front of our apartment, where the sidewalk has been dug up for the endless construction project that seems poised to swallow our building. In compensation, it offers us this: evidence that our neighborhood, like most of Amsterdam, was once under water.

Construction here is distinguished by the ubiquity of cranes. Not the flying kind but rather the kind that are used to hoist things and move them around. I don't think construction is possible in the cramped spaces of Amsterdam, where every inch of dry land is pressed into service, without the use of construction equipment that is extremely vertical. We see the cranes everywhere, astonishingly tall, lifting everything from two-by-fours to forklifts. The garbage collection trucks use a sort of crane device as well.

Of course, springtime is when the baby animals are born, as we were reminded 2500-acre pleasure forest that was planted just outside Amsterdam about 75 years ago. Just a quick bike ride away, it offers miles of biking paths, canoes and pedal boats for rent, a rowing club, a cheese farm, several swimming areas, a high ropes course,



numerous watering-holes, and an amazing little farm where the goats and children mix as naturally as if they were not from different species. The goats wander about the playground -- I saw one trying to go up a metal slide -- and Clara picked one up and held it like a baby. Birthing season was in full swing when we arrived on Saturday, with several goats in labor and one still-wet newborn tottering about on shaky legs. I watched on Mama goat labor for quite a while, hoping to be present when her kids emerged, but eventually had to leave. I felt for her, fully recognizing the focused and inward-turned expression on her face. We couldn't resist going back the next day, and there in the spot where she had been laboring were the two adorable fruits of her labor.

Okay, I bet you were expecting to hear about the flowers. It's still glove-wearing weather in the mornings, but the afternoons are sunny and warm. Here in the city we have already had snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils, hyacinth and forsythia, and the trees are currently blooming.

About the tulips. While they are ridiculously cheap in the markets, I've not yet seen them blooming in gardens. However, the Keukenhof, the mother of all tulip gardens, is now open, and I'm planning to go there next week with a long-lost Dutch cousin. I'll report back then.