[ June 2017 ] Our main purpose of visiting Amsterdam in the Netherlands this time was to participate the Urban Photo Race (UPR).
This event is a photo competition which is basically the same as the Photomarathon we joined a few times in Italy, but the rules were different in detail.
For example, in both events, the participants get together three times a day and every time they will get the new themes, but in UPR the meeting places changed every time, so we had to walk with a map.
And the Photomarathon gave us 9 themes altogether, but only 6 themes in UPR.
But in UPR, we had to submit three photos each per theme, so 18 photos altogether and if you did not submit 18, you would get disqualified.
Another big difference was that in Photomarathon we submit the photos on the next day, but in UPR we had to do it on the same day.
So overall, it was a tougher event.
The number of the participants were obviously fewer in Amsterdam, but they all looked rather serious.
They did not have the playful things such as T-shirts which were given in Italy. 
Now, we were given the first three themes at the first meeting place, which were ①I finally became an old guy ②On track ③Not close enough.
This event was held in the Netherlands, but the organisers were not Dutch.
They were a group of people from various countries, so the themes were all in English.
I suppose there are few Dutch people who do not understand English anyway.
On top of those three themes, there was another theme “Water in the City” which was common to all cities which were having the similar events on the same day.
Apparently, other cities such as Dublin in Ireland, Nice in France and somewhere in China were doing the similar things on the day.
Because we were not so familiar with the geography of Amsterdam, we asked the organiser to point the next meeting place on the map, and then started walking towards there taking many photos.
On the way, a drunk couple started talking to us.
I do not think they were drinking early in the morning, but they seemed drunk from the night before.
They asked us about the event, so I explained and told them the themes.
The woman said “Why don’t you take a photo of us for the theme ‘Not close enough’?”.
That sounds pregnant, I thought.
And at the same time, I thought ‘That is an idea. It might be interesting if I could take a photo showing the distance of the human relationship’ and felt grateful to them.
