We visited some Ukrainian relatives living in Almere-Buiten. Almere is a city relatively nearby Amsterdam; Almere-Buiten is sort of a sleeping suburb of Almere ... though, it's probably as much of a "sleeping suburb" of Amsterdam; at least the father of the house had his day job in Amsterdam, 40 minutes by railway (and some short walking distance at both ends).
Almere is a part of the Southern Flevopolder - earlier seabed drained up and made into land in the late 60s. (I did some excessive reading on Wikipedia on this, perhaps I'll follow up with a separate post on the polders of The Netherlands). According to this family, it's very nice to live in Almere. One of the things they were particularly happy with was the successful planning of infrastructure. There are 5 separate networks - first there are separate roads for bikers, buses and cars, and it's very clearly marked whom should yield whenever those roads cross. The bus road has bells and light signals stopping people from crossing it when the bus arrives. In addition there is the train line and the canals. Here is a bus stop, and the bike road crossing the bus road:
Although there are higher buildings in the centre of Almere, Almere-Buiten is dominated by terraced residental houses, where one family lives over two floors plus an attics, with one or two outer walls shared by neighbours, and a small private garden area behind the house, sometimes behind fences. The houses below are not really representative, those "hangar-style" house-pairs were exceptional enough that I bothered to take a photo:
Here is the Blocq van Kuffeler pumping station - pumping water out from the channel into the Markermeer to keep Southern Flevopolder dry. The land itself is several metres below mean sea level. This is the only drainage pump in the Southern Flevopolder - but the channels are connected to the Eastern Flevopolder, which has three pumps.
There are of course no charming old buildings to be seen on this "new" land, no charming organically grown town centre, everything is planned and relatively new; Almere is certainly not on the bucket-list of places to see while being a tourist in the Netherlands - even though there exists official tourist sites both for Almere and Flevoland.
Water-land boundaries are usually charming, and after almost 50 years the nature has become quite established on the island. Here is one of the smaller channels:
Here is one of the bigger channels, from a relatively high bridge. I don't remember if the bridges could open or not (though, easy to find out - I found some official dutch site with information on all bridges, locks, harbours, etc):
Bike road with trees on both sides (Avenue-style):
Bike road with water on both sides:
I think the road is going into some area reserved for birds
Some observation hut where one can observe birds to the left
Not much to be said ... there is some commercial activity around the train station.
Note the bus lane in the middle. Bells to be heard as the bus approaches ...
If you came in through the steemitworldmap.com site, then the coordinates were taken from this beach. It's not often I'm bathing in a lake on an island in a lake, last time was probably a decade or two ago at Valaam in Lake Ladoga. This lake was actually quite big, with boat traffic and waves. The water was not much clean, but cleaner than the Markermeer, and yes ... people were bathing ... I also did a bit of swimming, but kept my head above the water.
... and my son created a fortress in the sand...
... which eventually got expanded into six rooms ...
Selected photos available in original quality on IPFS Qmc5sMt7vimweuum6i2P6aJze4JQDWTCD7DBwRuPDrgrxt. All photos taken available in original quality on IPFS QmPiqZyYJrRkxpPmWMc5mfA7sC6B8NRAjPgqWAoktRhTHB. License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Now more than a week has passed since we left Almere ... I've had quite a break in my vacation posts recently ... it does take some time to sort the photos and compile posts, besides my monthly cellphone data qouta ran out, I had huge problems getting online for the rest of July. It may also be challenging to use the laptop onboard, with waves, too hot inside, too sunny outside, etc. Now I'm in Copenhagen. The rest of the family went to Russia. Hopefully I'll get time to post more vacation posts ... but I also have lots of other things that I should get done while I'm here.
