There’s one word for New Year’s Eve, Amsterdam – crazy! Crazy busy, crazy with firecrackers being let off in the streets all day.
It’s shaping up to be a beautifully sunny day with a balmy 8 degrees Celsius, so it’s a good day to get away from the Old Town, and wander around the less frantic areas of Jordaan and nearby streets….
An early evening spent wandering around a different part of the Light Festival is better suited to video than photos, so below are a couple of videos of two of the artworks.
This is a short video of the Light Bridge, by Tjep of the Netherlands.
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178 bottles, 1 message, by Saskia Hoogendoorn and Martijn Wijnands of The Netherlands, is one of the standout installations. The rotating heart made from bottles changes colour and pattern with each rotation.
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The audio tracks reveal just how noisy it was – at 6pm, amateur fireworks, people lighting crackers, just mad. The noise, crowds and the street drug dealers offering me white heroin marketed as cocaine have me taking refuge in the Sofitel well before midnight. Amsterdam is one of the few countries in the world that have signs and electronic billboards warning tourists that there is a ‘bad batch’ of cocaine being dealt by street dealers that have killed 3 tourists so far. One dealer waves a bag of white powder at me less than 100 metres from the entrance to the hotel. Enough already with the incredible numbers of young guys either stoned or looking for a stoner cafe. There’s ‘colorful’, and there’s just plain gross.
