Wintry Dutch Day

I think this will be my most diary-like blog entry to date! All previous blog entries were about my travels, so far through Scandinavia and East Africa. But on this cold December day I am sitting here at home in Holland and thinking how amazing the light is, unique to this country I'd say (this coming from someone who has lived here 5 and a half years, so not a native!). The picture above is Vermeer's View of Delft. What I find so striking about some of these Dutch masters is how if you go to where they were, they were really just painting exactly what they saw. The light here IS that unique.

I bicycled around today, going to the market and running various errands and i really found the winter sky just incredible. The weather here is usually wet and cloudy. Add a lack of light due to a late sunrise and an early sunset, and you get a remarkable result of pastels and mist. The light can play strange tricks due to the fog and mist and at times it looks as if the daylight is escaping from strange source behind a cloud while not appearing to come from above. Due to the northern lattitude here the hours of sunlight in the winter are indeed limited, reaching it's "darkest" around December 21. What i find bizarre is waking up while it's still dark and by the time the middle of the day is here, the sun appears to be setting already. Yesterday I noticed a street light that went on at approximately 2 PM. And when the clouds do manage to clear for a while, due to the northern latitude again, the sun is at such an angle that it seems to shine directly into your line of vision.

In any case, this leads to higher coffee consumption, stronger desire to sleep. My plan as soon as this is written is to curl up in a ball by a warm spot and take a nap!

I've been making a list of blog entries that I should do, including my recent trip to Thailand, a concert I conducted in, and wrote a piece for, and then also a little photo-tour of my appartment which I moved into last April. Check here again soon for the update!