Memories of lost shoes

Next week I will be travelling again and due to the schedule, I will not be able to get home after the last day of training and will therefore have an extra night. While not where the training will be, I have chosen to spend that night in Amsterdam, a place where I visited in 2013 with my wife and it holds a lot of memories - Mostly unpleasant.

Well, that is not really true as we had a great time in Amsterdam and even got a day or two of great weather during our stay. The only problem we encountered was in the last hour of our planned stay in the city where upon arrival back to our hotel we discovered that my wife's suitcase had been stolen from the security room where we ha left it while we explored the city before catching the train for Brussels, the next city on our itinerary.

This was quite a disaster and meant that we couldn't leave as we spent the next 4 hours at the police station to sort things out and that meant missing one full night and most of the first in Brussels, where we only had 3 nights booked. Then, all of the souvenirs that we had bought on our travels so far were in her bag. The worst part however was that all of my wife's clothes and most importantly, her shoes, were taken.

My wife is a very small woman and she has a size 34 foot, which is a children's size - all of her heels are hand-made and have to be ordered about 2 months in advance. We had planned a romantic week in Paris to end our travels and without clothes and shoes for anything fancy, we ended up bumming around more. Which was lucky, because after replacing everything that had to be replaced immediately, we didn't have a great deal of budget left to travel with.

It was still a fantastic trip however and the event gave a memorable story (actually there were many along the way) that we sometimes laugh over now. What my wife remembers the most from the night she lost her bag was how nice the police were while we filled the reports and how they kept giving her hot chocolate. They even offered to send us replacements for two books that we had lost, English and Finnish versions of the Diary of Anne Frank that we bought after touring through the house the day before. We didn't take them up on it.

However, after being on that tour, the events that we went through the next day paled in comparison and put it all in perspective, it was just stuff after all and we were not in danger nor would we suffer the consequences of the loss for too long. Although, it doesn't ever feel nice to have such things happen, I know, similar has happened a couple of times in my life.

These images are from that trip where we spent the days walking around enjoying the sights and sounds of Amsterdam. It is a beautiful city to photograph and I am hoping that I will have a chance to take some images and plan on getting up early before departure and wandering before there are many people on the streets. While travelling at any time, I love taking images and what is great about being on Steem, is it gives them more utility than just as a trigger for my own memory. Being able to share them with others makes the taking of them more valuable - like anything I guess.

With all the things to see and do in Amsterdam, it always reminds me of lost shoes.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]