I was told once that if you keep coming back to the same place, it's not really the place you are exploring, but yourself. True or not, I would find myself in either Venice or Saint Petersburg - year after year - with my pockets bulging with film and an idiotic smile crossing my face. At last, I was there again! Besides the obvious: lots of canals and history, I was anticipating to get comfortably lost.
Amsterdam never had this magnetism, not for me. The three cities would make a nice trio, you'd think, but Venice and Saint Petersburg felt like parents living apart and far away from me, yet I was attached to them. Contrary to that, the Dutch wonder would be a stepdad I wasn't close with. Russian Tsar, Peter the Great, modeled his namesake (and the new pompous Russian capital) after Amsterdam but, as time and river flowed by, Saint Petersburg turned out to be too disturbing for a bicyclist...