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Sunflowers and bike

Sunflowers and bike

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Amsterdam – the city of bicycles

Amsterdam is full of bicycles, moving from all directions, with different speed, coming at you without warning. And when they do not move, they are everywhere, at every tree, street lamp, house, shop, even in the water of the Amsterdam canals. From time to time, when so many bicycles lay in the water that they obstruct the boats passage, the municipality has to dig the canals deeper and take all these rusty pedal vehicles out.
Nowhere in the world may you see such a variety of bicycles. There are big ones, black, like eighty years ago (in Dutch: oma fiets – grandma bicycle), there are ones like in the US in the fifties of the 20c. - beach cruisers, bicycles with the loading box, race bicycles, mountain bicycles, postmen bicycles, Swedish and Swiss Army bicycles, police bicycles with a clear sign POLICE and postmen bicycles with a pair of huge red bags at the back.
Amsterdam and the bicycles have to be inseparable. To leave your bike on the street, you better use a thick chain and a hardened steel lock, because the theft of a bicycle is not regarded in Amsterdam as a real crime. It is more like not giving back the book to the library, or borrowing somebody's umbrella when it rains. Each year, tens of thousands of bicycles just vanish from the streets of Amsterdam in an inexplicable way. Certainly - some of them are resold or exported, but not as many as it may seem. Some people say the ones that disappear, all land on the bottom of the Amsterdam canals, stolen for a day or two and later thrown into the water.
For a photographer, Amsterdam bicycles complete the colorful and rich scene of this unique city. They are almost like graffiti's – hand painted, in all possible colours and in many different shapes.
Free photo gallery of the bicycles in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (also known as Holland). Photos of old, colorful and strange bikes...
Believe me: Amsterdam is really bike-city!
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