Category:

Netherlands

netherlands travel blog

The Amsterdam Diaries #1 – I was at Woodstock

Once upon a time, or –actually- just one year ago, a crazy German guy wrote me an even crazier email. He identified himself as the curator of Urban Art Festival Amsterdam. He also stated that he was producing a mural in Amsterdam Southeast and wanted me to write about it. I was already planning to head to Northern Europe to attend the Belgian street art festival The Crystal Ship, and I had to fly to Nuart Aberdeen festival one week after that. So I figured it would have been at the very least convenient to spend the days in between in Amsterdam.

What could possibly go wrong?

Art Cemetery Rotterdam

How to go see Rotterdam Art Week and never make it to the actual Art Fair

All I ever heard about this harbour city is that, after being bombed flat during WW2, Rotterdam was completely rebuilt by some visionary architects who made it the modern and out-of-the-way urban jungle that it is today.

Crossing its wide, busy roads feels like walking through a city; the water surfaces (which are usually so large I won’t call them ‘canals’) reflecting the skyscrapers blinking lights at night look like the open sky dotted with stars.

Rotterdam Video

Blown away by Rotterdam Art Week

Art Cemetery Utrecht

A startling weekend in Utrecht, where the canals are tourist-free

Since the moment I first stepped into Utrech from the back of the train station, I felt ‘something different’ hovering in the crisp winter air. It was something I haven’t ever experienced in Amsterdam, something tangible in the streets and – yet – seemingly impossible to pinpoint.

Utrecht Video

Vlogging from the EYE Hotel in Utrecht

Amsterdam Street Art Street Art Guide

Street Art in Amsterdam Zuidoost: Ammar Abo Bakr’s mural and more urban art in Bijlmer

“We should ask Ammar what the traditional games played in Egypt are. Then we teach them to the kids of Bijlmer and arrange a play-day for the vernissage of the mural” I said to Anouk while we were setting the dinner table and a full white moon was shining on the wide, iconic windows of Amsterdam’s buildings.

On that afternoon, Anouk had shown me the ‘ghetto of Amsterdam’ and I couldn’t get over all those kids from various ethnicities playing together, or their laughs echoing over the lake that majestically mirrored the 11-storey wall that soon would have been painted by Ammar Abo Bakr.