How the Dutch Park Their Bicycles

I'm back for a visit in Holland.  My daughter commissioned me to take an artsy photo of a very common sight here:  bicycles!  So far I haven't succeeded.  It's not that there aren't enough bikes. Believe me:  there are!  It's feeling the pressure to create something stunning and possibly overthinking it.  

Yesterday I decided to try my luck in Rotterdam, the city where I was born and home of the very best Dutch soccer club Feyenoord.  I thought that for sure there'd be many bicycles at the train station "Centraal Station".  When I got there I saw a brand new, ultra modern, striking building but NO bikes!  That just couldn't be right!

I walked around the building and definitely saw many people with bicycles. What did they do with them? Curious now, I followed them to this escalator specifically designed for bicyclists.

And the mystery was solved.  I had never seen this before: an entire, huge space devoted to a bicycle-parking-garage with numbered lanes, arrows, mirrors, signs stating number of free spaces and two-tier bicycle racks.

It was an amazing sight! 

I spent a wonderful day photographing the rest of Rotterdam. Unfortunately I still haven't produced a beautiful, artsy photo of bicycles for my daughter to put on the wall of her new apartment.  Unless she thinks this will do: