Amsterdam

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Open-hearted, welcoming, and prosperous, Amsterdam is a good-time city that merrily opens its arms to all comers. It embraces its tourists, its cyclists, its boat-folk, and its multicultural community. It is friendly, unflappable, and approachable; a city confident in its own skin but with one eye fixed on the future, buzzing with creativity and bonhomie.

But it is also a city of surreal juxtapositions; an elegant cityscape of 165 waterways, 1,280 bridges, and thousands of venerable 17th-century mansions exist side by side with the sleazy alleyways of the Red Light District. A city with some of the most impressive art museums in the world that tolerates sex clubs and dope smoking; that has one of Europe’s best concert halls but also a gritty nighttime scene springing up around Westerparksea plays in providing nutrients to our global ocean system. I was astonished to encounter a large volume of marine snow, which is essentially debris and dead matter from various creatures. It looks like a blizzard you’d find in the wilderness—but underwater. The marine snow is critical in circulating nutrients to the surrounding ecosystems and it was truly incredible to see this process in action and capture it visually. Another notable experience was seeing the breadth of life, and how many of the creatures in the area – in the absence of competition or prey – actually evolved to be much larger in size than they would have been elsewhere in the world. One of my favorite creatures we encountered was the Antarctic sea star. It has such