Category: Photos

Well, Delhi is something of a bust – I’ve barely taken any pics. Partly it’s because I’m not doing any sightseeing, partly it’s because I’m self-conscious on my own with a camera on the few occasions I have been sightseeing. I had to take this, though – I’ll lighten it when I get home and have a better computer, but it’s the sign for a Freemason’s hall. Having been to London recently, and seen the incredible edifice that is the Freemason’s Hall there, it’s hard not to boggle at the contrast.

Dubai Airport is very shiny. Dubai is very shiny, true, but the airport is REALLY shiny. Of course, nothing is naturally shiny, especially not in a desert, so Dubai has to have an army of people employed to keep things shiny. Not people from Dubai, you realise, but people imported into Dubai from places less shiny and clean and glossy. People who aren’t at all shiny themselves, especially not after years of working here. Naturally, being imported, they sometimes need to go home, and like everyone else, they do that via Dubai International Airport, where they annoy the shiny and perfect denizens of the airport by doing things like this. Pretty much everyone who walked past made tutting noises of disgust.

I suppose if Sheikh Mo had his way, he would have a completely different airport for all the migrant workers and slaves, so people wouldn’t be reminded of what this place actually cost in human misery. Of course, Sheikh Mo has other problems these days.

I’m off. To Delhi and Guangzhou. It’s a work trip, and will give me little time for tourism, but still, it’s pretty cool. I’ve been to Guangzhou before, it’s a pretty regular trip, Delhi is new.

I’m an efficient packer – it took me about 30 minutes to get everything together, with only two things forgotton (tweezers and a hat).

I’ll be in airports for pretty much the rest of the day – I land in Delhi at 9:30 tomorrow morning. Expect picures of airline food and people under flurorescent lights.

I wanted to like Dungeons and Dragons, I really did. It was cool, lots of my friends played, it incorporated all the things I liked, or kind of liked, and I just never really got into it.

Part of the issue is that when I was in high school, I was never quite the right kind of nerd. I was on the library club, and Reach for the Top, but then I ended up on the yearbook, not the chess club, or math club. I did all the sciences except for biology (I cannot see through a stereoscopic microscope at all, even now with glasses), but not computing science. I missed out on the really formative hardcore nerd stuff.

At university, I joined the Gamesters of Triskelion, but everyone else already played and had characters and knew the games, and I didn’t. I also joined the women’s centre, and they didn’t really understand the appeal of nerds at all (not that the nerds really understood the feminists for their part). Within a few years, Dungeons and Dragons was waning, making way for computer games.

I bough this die recently, a kind of nostalgia for a youth I almost had.

This little dude is only two inches high (and most of that is hair) and made of beads. He has a safety-pin attached to his back, but I’ve never really worn him.

I just think he’s so manic and bright – he sits on my mantelshelf and waves.

Late afternoon sunlight and tree bark – I couldn’t resist the combination. The light was almost like Johannesburg light, although it was cold. Having lived most of my life at 27 degrees off the Equator, I find the light up here too weak and low, most of the time. This day was an exception.

I was walking home when I spotted this – a pristine Glenn Miller casette tape case, with a casette in it, lying on the patch of earth around a tree stump. There was nothing else around, no other litter or anything, and it looked like it had been placed there deliberately. Very weird.

Postscript – it is apparently Glenn Miller’s birthday, so I assume this is an homage.

Walking home today, about six o’clock, this was the canal. Peaceful and calm, although cold, and the light a lovely blue. It was almost too dark to take the picture, hence the slight blur, but it was so lovely to see, I had to use the pic.

Before we moved to Preston, we looked up the town on Flickr, to see what we were getting ourselves into. One of the pictures was of a telephone pole just like this one, with wires going in all directions to the local houses. It was captioned something like “twenty-first century communications networks in Preston”. It was a great picture, and when we moved to Preston we saw just such poles everywhere. There;s even one outside our house, visible from the kitchen window. The thing is, though, the phones work fine, so does the Internet, which is faster and cheaper than anywhere I’ve ever lived, and it all comes through those wires, so we shouldn’t complain.

London is full of people. And I mean FULL of people. I still think of myself as a city person, and I miss cities, but I am clearly not used to people, because London left me feeling claustrophobic and overwhelmed a lot of the time. It didn’t help that I wasn’t feeling well, but I just felt I was constantly bupbing into people, getting in their way, having them in my way. It was loud, and too warm, and generally quite unpleasant. We did find an amazing find, though: the Masonic Temple. Martin wanted to see it, so we went, and when we got there, there was a museum and a tour, so we got to see the inside of the temple, and the most incredible mosaic. The whole thing is rather nazi-soviet, though, having been built in 1928 or thereabouts, the height of Deco – all hard edges and massive spaces. The mosaic covers the curved spaces between the walls and ceiling, and is largely light blue and gold, with illustrations of key scenes, symbols and figures. The whole thing was awe-inspiring, but once again, no pictures allowed.