Category: travel

silver fish, gold fish (a pair of almost completely unrelated photos)

I present to you one giant silver fish, and one smaller gold fish.¹

At the Boston Common on New Year’s Eve, while wandering around looking at ice sculptures, we came across this big silver-colored fish car. It was possibly related to the First Night events going on there, but in a way that was not clear to me. What was clear to me was that I needed to take a picture of it.

When I went to China in 2012, my hotel in Shanghai had rather unusual furniture. Most of the larger pieces (the armoire, dressers, settee, and even the beds) were adorned with fairly large and extremely shiny gold fish. I only wish I had better photos to show off their extreme shininess.

For another still grainy view of one of the gold fish (possibly even the same one, you can click here. I have even been inspired to upload a short video taken while walking through this very…special…room³. Sadly, the movie is also quite grainy, but you can still make out the shiny fishy shapes on the beds and other places.

So, tell me about you: If you were going to build a giant fish onto a car, what color fish would it be? And what sort of car? (A Toyota with a trout? A Mini with minnow?) And if you were going to design furniture featuring large shiny gold animals, which animals would you choose? These are the important questions that I pose to you.

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¹ This post is in response to Ally Bean‘s prompt to of “gold or silver [photos of?]”. Naturally, I could not choose either just silver or just gold. Much like I couldn’t settle on either just a haiku or an acrostic.²
² If you, regular reader or hapless passerby, would like to also suggest a prompt or ask a question to elicit a post from me, feel free to do so in my post of last week. I would be tickled if you did.
³ If you feel the need to stay in such a room, it was a suite in the Salvo Hotel in Shanghai. I cannot guarantee that all of their suites are equally well-appointed with fish.

an eclectic row of hedges (friday foto finder: hedge)

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to share photos on the theme of hedge. Around here, there is plenty of shrubbery and such in the landscaping, but it’s not so common for the bushes to be arranged in hedges. Of course, the term hedging my bets came to mind, but that didn’t generate any photos either. I found myself checking out the definition of hedge for inspiration:

From Dictionary.com¹

hedge [hej] Show IPA noun, verb, hedged, hedg·ing.
noun
1. a row of bushes or small trees planted close together, especially when forming a fence or boundary; hedgerow: small fields separated by hedges.
2. any barrier or boundary: a hedge of stones.
3. an act or means of preventing complete loss of a bet, an argument, an investment, or the like, witha partially counterbalancing or qualifying one.

I didn’t particularly remember taking any photos of hedges, but I thought surely I must have, especially during my travels. I did find quite a few samples, which I’ve lined up here in a row for your perusal. (Though really, this is more of a column of hedge photos than a row of them.) (I also wonder if some of the towering French examples still count as hedges. I suppose that I am hedging my bets by showing so many varied examples.)


2007: Le Jardin des Plantes (“The garden of plants”), Paris, France. A range of hedge sizes can be seen, including some that are rows of not-so-small trees.


2007: The gardens of the Palace of Versailles, France. Off in the distance, you can see what look like rows of box hedges. But I think the tiny specks in front of them are people, so there’s no way they are “small trees.” They are gigantic. The mother-of-all-box-hedges gigantic.


2007: Saarbrücken, Germany. I liked this leafy gate, which enticingly showed glimpses of a hedge maze behind it. (Attempts to photograph said hedge maze in the fading light with the little point-and-shoot I used at the time were blurrily unsuccessful. Here they are, tiny so as to hide the blur:


2009: Parc Güell, Barcelona. Swarms of tourists swarm over a stairway in front of a pretty unremarkable hedge.


2009: Alcázar, in Sevilla, Spain. Judging from my photos, Alcázar is chock full of hedges, some of them quite striking. Funny how they didn’t stick in my memory.


2009: Again in Alcázar, in Sevilla, Spain. These hedges were a bit more unruly.


2012: at MIT, Cabridge, MA. Finally, here’s a hedge that’s closer to home. I’m pretty sure I was looking more at the willow trees, whose dangling strands looked remarkably even at the bottom, reminding me of freshly-trimmed bangs.

To see what hedges others have lined up, and share your own, pay a visit to the fff blog.
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¹ This citation of Dictionary.com made me think of this article: “If everyone still wrote like they did in college.”²
² Of course, when I was an undergrad, there was no Dictionary.com. We had to cite a freakin’ dictionary. Like, a book.³
³ I feel like such an old fart. Imagine me saying, in my best crotchety old man voice, “Back in my day, we didn’t have the internets or wikipedia or this dot com nonsense. We had to dig our references out of the fields by hand, with nothing but spade and card catalog.”

access denied

I’m feeling rather obstructed in my progress these days. Here are 4 photos of gates and doors that I couldn’t get through.


September, 2009. Sevilla, Spain.


August, 2011. Macau.


March, 2012. New York, NY.


August, 2012. Massachusetts.

Clearly, I am able to attach significance to these bits of metal (unlike those of 2 days ago). Also, I do seem to get around, even when I’m not getting through…

golden cranes in the Forbidden City

This was a photo from my May, 2012 trip to mainland China. I was in Beijing ever-so-briefly, and made a mad dash through the Forbidden City on a morning before catching the train to Shanghai for my conference. This was inside one of the many museums within the walls of the Forbidden City housing antiquities and other national treasures. I spied these two golden cranes in a display case, which fit nicely into my running crane theme¹ inspired by Friday’s foto finder theme of crane. (Of course, the cranes, while beautiful, are not what I found most interesting about the photo. I like the confusing layers of of light and reflections. Not to mention the expressions on the faces of the two other tourists behind the cranes’ display case.)

Once again, I am reminded of how little I have shared from that trip on this blog. I took hundreds of photos, and have many story I want to tell.

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¹ The theme is doing the running, not the cranes. To my knowledge, I have no photos of running cranes. I’m not even sure whether they do run.

sign and symbol

I often find my eyes drawn to signs, especially the bold and simple graphics of traffic signs. (That is, after all, what they are designed to do.) While some people find that the signs can be detracting from a photo, I actually like the way signs can give a sense of place, especially through the language, text and cultural symbols. In other cases, a sign symbol is used so internationally that rather than reminding us of the locality of a site, we are reminded of our connections.

This is all a rather lofty and overblown introduction to a set of photos I have which include “do not enter” signs. The symbol is a red circle with a horizontal white bar, and it appears on signs the world over. (Or, at the very least, many countries around the world.) Here is I selection I have from 4 continents, taken in 5 different years.

Europe:

In front of the Notre Dame, Paris, France, August, 2007


Sevilla, Spain, September, 2009

Asia:

Macau, August, 2011

North America:

Boston, MA, USA, October, 2010.

South America:

Campinas, Brazil, May, 2008. (Yes, this last one isn’t actually a sign. It’s the light shining through a circular window onto a red carpet in the hallway of the hotel where I was staying. The window is open slightly in the middle, which caused there to be a brighter bar of light in the circle of light. Try to tell me that this doesn’t look like a do not enter symbol.)

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This week’s (okay, last week’s) friday foto finder theme was “circle.” I have oodles of circles in my photo library, but this circular symbol was one that came to mind for the theme.

green spaces of Hong Kong (friday foto finder: green)

Hong Kong, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, is known as an urban jungle. But the territory also boasts a wide range of green spaces, which more closely resemble “jungle” than “urban jungle.” When I visited Hong Kong in 2011 for a conference, I enjoyed exploring the urban jungle, and also managed to see a few of the greener spaces. The highlight of these excursions was a hike with my friend YTSL, a Hong Kong local who knows her way around the green spaces of Hong Kong. We met up and took a series of subway rides and buses out to Wong Shek, on the Sai Kung Peninsula. (I wouldn’t have remembered exactly where it was we went, but happily YTSL mentioned it in her post shortly after our hike.)

The day was hot and humid, and also very hot and really humid, but I managed not to pass out. I also managed to take several hundred photos. (Pausing to take a photo is a good way to catch one’s breath.) Did I mention that it was hot and humid? It was all entirely worth it, as the views were stunning, and I appreciated them even through the heat and humidity.

The blue skies were filled with fluffy white rather expressive-looking clouds.

Below the blue and white there was plenty of green to be seen.

There were splashes of other colors, too, among the green fronds.

The path was sometimes narrow, sometimes not, sometimes paved, sometimes not. But always surrounded by green.


A particularly photogenic cloud poses for the camera, trying to steal attention from the picturesque rocks, water and greenery.

We passed a small number of homes which appeared to be inhabited, and more that were clearly long abandoned.

Some of the abandoned buildings were taken over by green.

Our hike finished up with a ferry ride back to our starting point, which offered plenty more beautiful views of green peaks. (A few more photos from the excursion are included below, in the slideshow. And several hundred more are still on my laptop.)

This post was brought to you by the color green, which was week’s friday foto finder theme . Green abounds in my photo library, especially of the local greenery, but it seemed a good excuse to get back to posting some of my long-promised travel photos. To see what other green can be seen, stop by the fff blogfff 200x60

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sand and surf (friday foto finder: seaside)

This Sunday we headed to Salisbury Beach for what may be our second annual late August visit there. It was a beautiful sunny day, warm and breezy. We didn’t have too much time to stay, but we enjoyed lying on the sand and playing in the waves. I was supervising most of the wave-playing, so I didn’t get too many photos this time. These were three that I found quite pleasing. I was especially happy with the shell photo, as my telephoto lens captured more detail of the sand grains than I’d really noticed directly with my own eyes. (The sand is actually the same coarseness as what you can see in the seagull photo, though dryer than what the gull is walking on.) It made me wish that I’d taken more than one such photo! And also that I’d thought to bring home a handful of sand to photograph some more. (We did bring home plenty of sand, in our towels and sandals and stuck to the beach toys. But I’m not likely to scrape enough together to be photogenic!)

This week’s (okay, well, last week’s) friday foto finder theme is seaside. After spending some time looking through my old seaside photos, I realized that (what with the rarity of our seaside visits) I had already posted highlights from most of my seaside photo batches. (In fact, our last trip to Salisbury Beach was featured in a fff from June.) Rather than reposting, I opted to wait a few days to see what our weekend travels offered.

To see what other seaside delights have been offered, pay a visit to the friday foto finder blog.

Giant spiders of Northern California (friday foto finder: spiders)

Back in June of 2008, we had a trip to California to see my family in Oakland. One of our favorite things to do is to take the ferry over the bay to San Francisco. This particular visit, we were greeted by this cheerful fellow:

This is a sculpture by Louise Borgeois, and it apparently left the piers of San Francisco not too long after I saw it there.

The spider sculpture may have left, but I believe that there may be other giant spiders in the greater San Francisco area. At the Oakland Zoo, for example, the playground has a super cool spider web made of ropes for kids to climb on. At least, I believe it to be made of ropes. It is just possible that it was made by a giant spider who was scared off by the swarms of small children.

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to find and share photos of spiders. I’ve got quite a few photos of real spiders in my library, as well as photos of their webs. I have posted photos of real spiders before, too. (One of my favorite posts with photos was about a little green spider.) Come to think of it, I also have a fairly large collection of things with a spider or web motif, thanks to my love of Halloween. (I did, in fact, put spiderweb placemats on my wedding registry.) When it came time to post, though, this spider scuplture came to mind. (Perhaps because I missed the statue fff a couple of weeks ago.)

To see what other spiders have been caught, or to find out more about joining in on the foto-sharing fun, check out the fff blog.

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I feel I must offer an apology to Sally, who has a phobia relating to all sorts of arthropods, for the images and especially the title of this post. Sorry, Sally. I hope that I haven’t given you nightmares!

I also thought of YTSL, who has displayed many photos of interesting spiders and webs from her hikes around Hong Kong, including some real giant spiders. Check out her tag critter spottings to spot a few such critters. (Sally, I strongly recommend that you don’t do this…though you may enjoy some of her other photos of critters, some of which have fewer than 6 legs!)

around the world in big metal boxes (friday foto finder: transport)

Shipping containers are a common sight at ports the world over, as well as making their way inland on freight trains. These large rectangular boxes are often brightly colored, and, especially when stacked together, look like oversized toy blocks. The enormous cranes that are used for moving these boxes are also a striking sight, resembling strange, gigantic creatures. (Robot dinosaurs, perhaps? There is a claim, sadly debunked, that such cranes inspired the AT-AT walkers of Star Wars.)

I’ve found that my eye (and camera lens) have been drawn to shipping containers and their cranes on numerous occasions during my travels. Here are some shots of them on 3 continents.

First, here are some in the Port of Oakland (Oakland, California, USA) taken in 2008 from a ferry.

Moving westward, we have containers in Hong Kong. (Photos taken from a train heading to the airport in August, 2011. You can see more cranes in Hong Kong, this time in Hong Kong Harbour, on this earlier post.)

Heading westward to Europe, we have the port in Barcelona, Spain. (I took this from up on the Castell de Montjuïc, in September, 2009.)

And for good measure, we’ll return westward to North America once more, this time on the East Coast. These cranes for moving shipping containers were near the airport in Newark, NJ. (I think. This was on my way back home from Hong Kong in 2011. I’m too lazy to look up my old itinerary right now!) These cranes look like they might be at a rail yard.

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to find something to represent “transport.” With my love of travel by so many different modes of transport, the big challenge was to narrow things down.