Thursday travels via WindowSwap

Amsterdam

Tram in Amsterdam, found when I tried to find photos of trolleys there.

This is my favorite window view, so far, using WindowSwap.  I got to do a lot of people watching out this window.  There was a canal outside a window in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and people were biking across a little bridge along with cars, vans, mopeds, vehicles, pedestrians, and long, multisectional trolley cars going across the bridge.  Each of the trolleys had different window configurations.

Oooh, the bridge was raised as I watched, so that a long, empty barge could pass through.  It was almost as wide as the opening spanned by the bridge.  It moved through quickly, and the bridge came back down.  Fascinating to watch!  On the other side of the canal, pedestrians traversed a curved flight of stairs.  A dog on its own trotted across the bridge.

Word of the Day

tram / British = a trolley car.  Under other words for tram, I found trolley (which I used above) and streetcar (which is what Mother called the ones we rode in Chattanooga when I was a small child).  In another place, I found this definition:  "A tram is a rail vehicle that runs on tramway tracks along public urban streets."

Kigali

Sheila's window looks across a concrete courtyard at street level in Kigali, Rwanda.  In 2006, I read A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2000) by Gil Courtemanche, about the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda that were associated with the country’s civil war.  That was before I started blogging, but I did write about the book in 2014, twenty years after the killing began.  (Click the title to read my blog post.)

The book was very memorable, and I actually met one of the men who fled Rwanda and was living in Chattanooga in the early 2000s.  The massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus lasted for three months, and 800,000 people were killed.  From Sheila's window, however, I can't see much beyond the gated courtyard.

Luxembourg City

I see a residential area outside Igor's window in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg.  The street is narrow with parked cars narrowing it even more, so vehicles slow down when they approach each other.

Giza near Cairo

Oh, surprise, surprise!  I can see two pyramids — no, a little bit of the third one — as I stare out of Abdulrahman's window in Giza, Egypt.  I'm pretty sure it's the tops of these three I can see.  There are city buildings between the window and the pyramids, but I can't see any of the streets or traffic or people.  I've never seen a picture of these famous pyramids from a window with the shutters open.  Just the touristy sort, like this one I found online.