My father taught me to skate
My father also liked skating and has made tours around Amsterdam alone when we were too young to join him. My mother stopped skating after an accident that I will report later. My father put us on the ice when we were around 5 years old. We were with 5, 3 boys and 2 girls. We skated with my father several tours. The last tour we made with him was when he was 79 years old. At the side you see a picture of him between two of his children. After that we drunk together, as usual, chocolate milk and eat a pea soup in a bar along the canal.
We lived in the south of Amsterdam close to a canal (Stadionkade) with a lot of traffic. There we normally could not skate but a bit further outside the town was a small, no too deep pool of water with some long ditches that were large enough for children to learn skating. There we went to skate and to try different moves on skates, games like hockey, going fast and make curves. This was also the place where my mother went skating for the last time. She did not know how to stop. The wind blew her to the end of one of the ditches and that also was the end of her skating career.
We lived in the south of Amsterdam close to a canal (Stadionkade) with a lot of traffic. There we normally could not skate but a bit further outside the town was a small, no too deep pool of water with some long ditches that were large enough for children to learn skating. There we went to skate and to try different moves on skates, games like hockey, going fast and make curves. This was also the place where my mother went skating for the last time. She did not know how to stop. The wind blew her to the end of one of the ditches and that also was the end of her skating career.
With my father we also went to make small tours as well like the children in the photo.
Later we went alone to the Amsterdamse IJsClub next to the Olympic stadium to skate. Some went there to meet girls but we paid only attention to our skating speed.