In a Blur

This week's theme at Carmi's Thematic Photographic is blur

It brought to mind the photos I took last year when we drove through the small village of Freshford near Bath, in England. My greatgreatgreatgrandfather was born here. Unfortunately English country lanes are very narrow and unlike New Zealand roads, places to pull over and stop to take a photo seem to be sadly lacking. Furthermore, twilight was rapidly approaching. So even though we were getting quite practiced at clicking the camera on the move, the long exposure time dictated by the low light meant my photos of the village came out rather blurry.



There's a poem to go with this one (although the bridge described in the poem was actually in a different photo). The italics are a quote from another poem that was on Poetry Daily, I need to look it up to find the author and title.

Freshford

Yes, yes, you can’t step into the same
river twice, and I can’t cross
the same bridge as my ancestors,
but all the same, this bridge is one of the things
that has changed least since you lived here,
linking the village with the quarry, on narrow roads
meant for horses. On both sides now
the stone houses, clean and prosperous looking,
country retreats for the middle classes,
and cars pulling up at the inn, in the twilight.
There were weavers and washerwomen once.
Where are their rough cottages? Pulled down,
or renovated, made large enough for small families
to sleep one to a bedroom. Your seventeen children
one by one left their shared beds
to trudge over this bridge to distant cities
in the hope of work. Look, here are photos
I took from the car window. Have I captured
your ghosts? I see only a blur. We are moving
too fast.

Someone's a Little Confused

In New Zealand, roadside stock warning signs tend to show sheep and cattle. In Australia, they are just as likely to show kangaroos. In England and Scotland, especially in Scotland, they warn most commonly of deer or red squirrels (much rarer than the introduced grey squirrel and therefore worthy of protection). We also saw one sign which warned of badgers.

We didn't see the animals nearly as much as we saw the signs, and when we did finally spot a deer, it was in an area where there were no signs. The same happened with the squirrels. Which may just possibly explain this sign, which left us scratching our heads a little...



(Yes, it's a little blurred, since it was taken from a fast-moving car).

Carmi at Writteninc has posted the topic of Signs for his "Thematic Photographic" this week.

Layers of History

The prompt over at read.write.poem this week was to "play with your parts". That is, to take three different parts of our lives - three towns, or three hobbies, or three jobs, or three people, and mix them up in one poem.

I have had some ideas but none of them have made them to a finished poem yet (or even a first draft). However, I realised that this poem which I wrote recently does mix up a number of different periods in history, so I thought it was at least partly relevant to the prompt to share it here.

And yes, it is a first draft, so suggestions will be considered.

The Crows at Stirling Castle

All afternoon the crows have been casting themselves
off the castle walls into the air. The tourists below
group in small knots around tartaned guides,
look down the steep cliffs but not up
to where the crows hover in dynamic stillness.
They are surfing the wind.

They are heedless of our attention,
they are heedless of the ox carts
that trundle up the steep slopes
with ale and salt herring,
of the bakers in the kitchen,
of the weavers in the tapestry workshop.

They hover above royal baptisms
and coronations, they scatter only briefly
when cannons hammer the castle walls.
A white feathered figure leaps to join them,
and plummets in a scatter of feathers
They disperse and regroup.

It is not “murder, murder” that they cry
as dark cloaked figures conspire in corners.
The crows have their own business to attend to,
hanging motionless in the updrafts
above the cliffs.

Ageing Beauty

In Inverness we needed to change travellers' cheques and I took a walk to the bank. On the way I passed a garden with this flower in it:



I absolutely love this photo. When I showed it to my daughter she said "dead flower". I guess technically it is, but I never saw it as such - rather, as a flower whose age and imperfections had added to the beauty of its shapes.

Rather like me, I hope. Ageing and imperfect, but still living and learning!

My British American Sentences

At read.write.poem this week we were invited to write American sentences, a poetic form of seventeen syllables invented by Allen Ginsberg. I have been writing one a day based on my trip to Britain in September, hence the title of the post.

For an extra, check out yesterday's post which is my favourite of those I have written so far, but doesn't have anything to do with the trip.

Hindu lady checks passports; Spaniard at the Hertz counter - welcome to Britain.

At Stonehenge we maintain a respectful distance, watched over by crows.

In Bath we read curses offered to Sulis two thousand years before.

Turtle-shaped soup tureen gleaming copper; on the wall a row of small skulls

The only red squirrels we see are those silhouetted on road signs.

In a box at the archives I find my greatgrandfather, young again.



(My greatgrandfather, found at Stirling Archives)

Seven Random Things

...about Britain

Of course we expected to see castles, crowded motorways, stone circles, and all the other things that are mentioned in the tourist literature, but these are some of the little things that took me by surprise (although some of them are fairly obvious, with hindsight):

1. Molehills



2. Road signs directing football traffic. In one town, the signs even directed "home traffic" and "away traffic" in opposite directions. I guess they have them enter the stadium at opposite ends and try to keep them apart to save fights.

3. No personalised plates on cars. At least, I thought there were no personalised plates until I met my cousin , and she turned up with a plate that said A13 and then the last three letters were her first name. Apparently the plates have to stick to a fairly strict format, which takes most of the fun out of it. No HIHOAG or REDQT or MYTAXI or K9DOC or D8LESS

4. Cottages that weren't. When I think of a "cottage", I imagine a wee one storeyed one or two bedroomed house set in a garden. In Britain the villages are very compact, with houses nestled right up to each other, and with their front doorsteps right on the footpath. They are labelled "cottage" even though they are usually two storeys high.
It took me a while to realise that they do actually have gardens - they have quite big long backyards, you just don't see them from the street.

5. Which is probably the reason for no 5 - blooming baskets everywhere. We do have hanging baskets in New Zealand, but not nearly as many, probably because we tend to grow things in the ground more. In the cities in the UK, spare dirt is at a premium, hence the hanging baskets. Being late summer, they were probably at their best when we visited.



6. Jet trails. I expected more traffic on the ground, but it didn't occur to me that there would also be more traffic in the sky. I've never seen so many jet trails in one place.



7. Laundry detergent. I was surprised to find there was no cold water laundry detergent, and no cold water setting on the washing machines. Instead, consumers are advised to save power by washing at 30 degrees C. Most people in New Zealand wash in cold water to save power (but we make up for it by spending far too much on heating, because our houses aren't well insulated or double glazed, unless they are very new).

I Want that Job!

About two and a half weeks ago I signed up for a Ning account, as it is the "home" for NaBloPoMo. I had a little trouble - the autofill on my computer included my last name without my noticing, and I don't want to display that on the web. Try as I might, I couldn't find out how to change the settings, so I decided to set everything to "private", e-mail Ning asking them to deactivate it, and start again with a new ID, password etc.

According to the website e-mails are dealt with within two business days. So, yesterday I received confirmation that the account had been deactivated. Two business days in two and a half weeks? It sounds as if someone doesn't work very hard.

(And I really wanted the account deleted. I'm not sure that I trust that word "deactivated". It sounds as if it is still there, somewhere).

Actually, anyone I know in America tells me that we have far more holidays than they do. We are having a long weekend here this weekend, we get Friday off. Yay! Every province in New Zealand has a public holiday for the provincial anniversary day. Canterbury's is 16th December. Except that we don't have a holiday then. Some time in the 1950's the holiday was moved to coincide with Show Day, so that we can all have a day off to go to the A&P show and admire the tractors. Earlier in the week, the fashionistas sneak off work for a day and go to the races (Cup Day) where they compete for "best dressed" and drink too much champagne. A few people even watch the horses.

Of course, being spring, the weather is rather wild. Autumn is much more settled. There was even snow in parts of the country this week, and we're only a month off the longest day of the year.

I still have about a gazillion photos from our trip that I haven't posted yet, so I will post them at random. This one is a peculiar fungus that took my fancy in Glen Nevis, near Fort William in Scotland:

Freshford

The photo below wasn't very successful as a photo. It was taken from a moving car, late in the afternoon, when the light was less than I realised.



It did, however, inspire a poem. The other inspiration was the first line (in italics) which was taken from a poem by Jeffrey Harrison, The Same River, which was the poem for Sunday 9 September at Poetry Daily

Freshford

Yes, yes, you can’t step into the same
river twice, and I can’t cross
the same bridge as my ancestors,
but all the same, this bridge is one of the things
that has changed least since you lived here,
linking the village with the quarry, on narrow roads
meant for horses. On both sides now
the stone houses, clean and prosperous looking,
country retreats for the middle classes,
and cars pulling up at the inn, in the twilight.
There were weavers and washerwomen once.
Where are their rough cottages? Pulled down,
or renovated, made large enough for small families
to sleep one to a bedroom. Your seventeen children
one by one left their shared beds
to trudge over this bridge to distant cities
in the hope of work. Look, here are photos
I took from the car window. Have I captured
your ghosts? I see only a blur. We are moving
too fast.

And here is the bridge:

Day 31: The Last Day

As it was our last day in Singapore, we packed up our luggage and left it at the front desk of the hotel before setting out for a last look at the city. We still had a number of vouchers for free entry to various attractions. One of these was a half-hour river cruise. That's where we were headed first.

Singapore Airlines operates a hop-on hop-off bus around the city, which is only $3 for the day on presentation of a boarding pass, or free with the particular package deal we had booked. So it was time to figure out the timetable and route. We found a stop a couple of blocks from our hotel and waited for the bus which took us to within a couple of blocks of the departure point for the river cruise.

On the way along the waterfront from the bus stop we admired the colourful lanterns:







Apparently it was the time of the autumn festival - although since Singapore is almost on the Equator, I'm not sure how they figure out when autumn is. Perhaps the festivals are celebrated at the same time of year as in China. It was a pity we couldn't come back and see these at night. Maybe if we had known they were there on the first night - but the free bus only operates to 7 p.m, so we would have had to find some other means of transport.

The river cruises are conducted in these traditional river boats:



though if you look closely you will see the modern air conditioner (and the boats are operated by modern motors).



The river boat operator is an elderly Chinese man



but he just drives the boat. The commentary issues from the loudspeakers which you can see in front of him, and it is recorded in an American voice, quite a young-sounding one.

After the river cruise, we walked along further to the next bus stop, and got on the bus again to go up to Orchard Road.





This is traditionally "the" area for shopping in Singapore. Actually, I felt that it wasn't quite up there with the ethnic areas - Chinatown and Little India - for souvenirs, or some of the big new malls, like Suntec City, for more western goods. The very expensive shops that sell labels like Gucci etc are in Orchard Road, but that was well out of our price range. Other buildings seemed to have quite a few empty shops.

We went to the headquarters of the main Apple retailer, but again P was unsuccesful in finding what he was after. Then we looked around the shops a little, found some lunch, and went to the next bus stop to ride back to our hotel.

We walked a block or two to the hotel, past the Singapore Art Museum:



where this installation was out front:



And then it was time to catch the free shuttle from the hotel to the airport, where eventually we boarded our flight back to New Zealand. This was another overnight flight, so it was the next morning - the 2nd October - when we arrived back.

Unfortunately we had stowed our cameras in the overhead locker, and although P had a window seat, there was another passenger on the aisle, so it wasn't very convenient to try and get them when we arrived back over New Zealand. We hadn't anticipated that we would take a different route back. The flight to Singapore crossed Australia diagonally and left the coast around Darwin. The return flight headed almost due south towards Adelaide before heading east to New Zealand. We crossed the South Island and turned northwards to Christchurch. The skies were clear and we had magnificent views of much of the South Island. Without our cameras all we could do was sit back and appreciate them!

And so we arrived back, and there was nothing more to do but loads and loads of laundry, before heading back to work the next day...

Day 30: Singapore, Part 3

After our morning tour we had about two and a half hours spare before our late afternoon and evening tour. We had been given a voucher for a "free" lunch (more on that later), along with a list of restaurants where we could use it. The two nearest were both at the Suntec City Shopping Mall, where there was also an Apple Computer store which might stock the doodacky P was after, so that's where we headed.

Just across from our hotel was the Chijmes restaurant complex.



Chijmes stands for "Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus" as the building was originally a convent. This complex is where we had dinner the night before.

A couple of blocks along the street, we passed Raffles Hotel, on the other side from the imposing frontage we had seen on our morning tour. There is a shopping arcade on this side, and we walked along under the verandah to take advantage of the cooling fans, peeked into the courtyard:





and accidentally walked right through the bar of the hotel. No-one seemed to mind, though we had heard you had to be suitably dressed to enter Raffles (no sandals, etc). In fact a large proportion of the patrons were wearing sandals.

This gentleman was the doorman/porter, I think.



And this is the entrance to Suntec City, a very large shopping mall based on about four towers.



It turned out that our "free" lunch vouchers actually meant that $7 each was deducted from the bill. Given that it was lunch, not dinner, we chose noodle dishes which were just over $7 each, but then we ordered drinks, of course, and when the bill came there were additions for the "complimentary" refreshing towelettes, and for the little dish of crispy bits of something that we were given at the start of the meal, so the bill came to about $15 total, after the vouchers were deducted. Not quite a free lunch.

P didn't find what he was looking for, but was advised to try their main shop near the Orchard Road shopping area. And then it was time to head back to the hotel to meet the afternoon bus.

The bus took us to Mt Faber where there is a cable car station. The cable car goes to Sentosa Island which is a resort island.



Sentosa has a number of very classy hotels, but also various attractions such as Underwater World, golf courses, a dolphin lagoon etc. We went first to Underwater World, which has an acrylic tunnel with a moving walkway through it - the first in the world, I believe, was in New Zealand at Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World in Auckland, which we went to when it first opened just over twenty years ago. I gather they are now quite common at aquariums (aquaria?) world wide.

It was Sunday afternoon and therefore very crowded with tour groups, and noisy. Chattering ladies in saris, teenage Asian girls posing in cute poses for photos on their friends' cell phones etc. I would have liked to have some quiet reflective time in front of the jellyfish, which were mesmerisingly beautiful:



However as usual we had to rush on, and the flashing of cameras detracted from any peaceful atmosphere.

At our next stop we were actually given a little free time. A number of the options involved extra admission fees. Instead we chose just to wander around a little and take in the views:





The large bare area in the photo above is a construction site, I gather they are building yet another resort on the island at this point.



and then we all went to ascend inside the Merlion:



this is a statue of a beast half lion and half mermaid. There is a viewing platform inside the mouth, and another viewing level at eye level (the statue's eyes, not ours). There is also an audiovisual show, and we were given a gold token to put inside a machine, and receive a card which could be exchanged at the gift shop - I still haven't figured out a use for the item we got in exchange!

The last stop on the tour was a sound and light show.



This was presented by a team of youths acting out a story line with the most banal imaginable plot, in very overblown style somewhat in the anime tradition - but the visual effects were quite spectacular. The photo is from the beginning of the show, before the more spectacular moving effects really got going. I didn't take too many photos as I didn't think they would come out, but P managed quite a few on his digital SLR. (A tripod was one of the things I really missed having on the trip. It didn't occur to me till we got back that I could have changed the ISO setting on my camera to take photos in low light).

We then went to the parking area nearby, where we boarded another bus that took us back to our hotel. We were dropped off at a different entrance than usual, and spotted an area where there were many food stalls around a courtyard of open air tables under umbrellas. So we decided to eat there. It was by far the cheapest food we found the whole trip, and obviously aimed at locals as English translation of the menus was minimal. However we found a stall where the meals were priced by the number of selections: eg "1 meat, 2 vegetables" or "2 meat, 2 vegetables", and by pointing - "I'll have that one, and that one" - we were quite adequately fed for under $10 for the two of us - in fact, we paid about the same as we paid for our "free" lunch.

Day 30: Singapore, Part 2

Even though the next stop on our tour was Chinatown, the first sight from the bus as we approached was this very ornate Hindu temple:



Note the vending machine selling a certain American drink - an incongruous modern addition to the traditional temple!



We were given twenty minutes or so to wander around the area, and some chose to visit the inside of the temple, however we felt we would see more by just exploring the sights of the streets.





These photos were taken in the open area where we reboarded the bus. Apparently it was a popular waiting/meeting spot:





The bus then took us to the premises of Singapore Gemstones where we were shown the machines, though no one was working since it was Sunday, and then went upstairs to the showrooms. In the first room there were many three dimensional pictures built up of small pieces of various semi-precious stones:






The pictures were beautifully crafted but not really to my taste.

The next room had jewellery and watches - we didn't buy anything but admired the workmanship.

And then it was time for our final stop at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. They are green and lushly tropical. We had free entrance to the orchid gardens, which are normally charged for (the rest of the gardens are free), so that's where we spent our time. Within the orchid gardens, the Cool House was a very popular destination - a welcome relief from the tropical heat and humidity.



Epiphytic orchids from the Cool House:



There was also a carnivorous plant display in the Cool House:

Day 30: Singapore, Part 1

The next day was Sunday and we had booked two tours - a Singapore City Tour in the morning, and a tour of Sentosa Island in the late afternoon and evening.

I find I have taken so many photos that I am going to spread them out over several posts.

Taking a tour has both positive points and drawbacks. The biggest positive was that we were picked up from our hotel and driven around in an air-conditioned bus. Given the heat and humidity, this was a lot less exhausting than walking combined with public transport, even though the distances weren't very far. Also, of course, a tour can fit a lot into a small space of time, compared to having to get from one place to another using public transport (even though the transport in Singapore seems to be very good and cheap). And then, there is a knowledgeable commentary.

The drawback was being hurried on everywhere. I found it stressful knowing that in each place, I couldn't get fully absorbed in the sights and sounds, because we had to be constantly aware of the time that we had to meet again to get back on the bus. We were told that if we were late, the bus would go on without us, and we would need to get a taxi to meet the bus at the next stop-off point. One family did put this to the test, and we found that in fact the bus would wait five minutes, but after that we went without them (and yes, they did manage to catch up in a taxi).

We were collected from the front of our hotel and taken to a central meeting point, where we all transferred to different buses for our different tours. The first stop for our tour was Little India:



where we explored an arcade with a wonderfully colourful range of shops:









The silk shop proprietor was a tailor, but also offered fabric by the yard. I considered going back later in our stay when I would have time to think about what I wanted to buy, but I never quite made it. The tour was just too rushed for leisurely buying. (I have cupboards full of fabric - I don't suppose I really need any more!)

A nearby apartment building decorated with laundry, Singapore style:



We drove past the Raffles hotel building, where it costs $6000 a night to stay in the top floor (Singapore dollars, which are similar in value to New Zealand dollars - it's a little less in US dollars, say about $4500).



Our next stop was near the waterfront, close to where Sir Stamford Raffles landed and established the modern city of Singapore - or should I say the colonial city of Singapore. Prior to that, there were inhabitants of course - it was a small fishing village.

There was a hockey game goind on at the "Padang". Behind the players is the City Hall, and the flying saucer like building is the Court House, according to my map. I felt very hot just watching the teams run around the field.



The concert hall roof is shaped like a "durian" - a fruit with a repulsive odour and a heavenly taste. The building is as iconic as the Sydney Opera House.



Quite a few locals were carrying umbrellas. I assume this was for shade from the sun rather than shelter from the rain - we were told it was approaching the monsoon season, but there was no rain during our stay.