My friends and I walked by this brooding swan this Sunday on our way to De Engel van Amsterdam. I named her Emma. She lives on the Damrak, hands down the ugliest street of Amsterdam. At night, she hears the brawl of drunken tourists. During the day, badly dressed tourists surround her. In the middle of all this ugliness, she built a nest with Tetra Briks and plastic Albert Heijn bags. Annelien claims that swans don't care about using local and organic materials and that Emma may think that her nest is the most comfortable home ever built. But I don't know.
Soon, Emma will be reading bedtime stories to her little ones. They will probably wake up in the middle of the night when the occasional amateur porn star comes by while looking for toys on the Dam. I know, I shouldn't think of Emma as a person or make her read stories. For all I know, she loves her plastic bags and noisy neighbors. It's not a bad thing though that she doesn't have a nose to know how the Dam smells.
These little guys lucked out. Their mother built a nest on one of the floatlands in Oud-Zuid. (Hobbemakade)
(Hobbemakade)
(Jacob Obrechtplein)
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