Category: Travel

In Memoriam

There is nothing like Paris. Before and after a backpacking vacation in the French Alps in 1991, I spent a few days just walking around in the city.

Paris 1

To honor the city and its people, I have scanned and edited the negatives from these walks, as a personal work of memory.
The view above is from the Centre Georges Pompidou. The spooky sky is caused by shooting through the plexiglass windows surrounding the outside escalators of the building.

Paris 6

The French have a wonderful tradition how their presidents invest enormous sums in art and culture.

Paris 2

Right outside, the Stravinsky Fountain, with sculptures by Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, vibrant with colors and life.

Paris 10

Then there is the Arab World Institute, one of the Grands Projets of François Mitterrand.

Paris 15

Another project Mitterrand completed: The conversion of a railway station into a museum, the Musée d’Orsay.

Paris 4

This walk will continue.

Water in Motion (Iceland XIV)

The law of gravity is still intact.

DSC 8709

Whenever in doubt, contemplating a healthy waterfall is certain remedy.

DSC 7651

The imposed free fall gives direction, determination and diverts the attention from situations where indecision has become a permanent state.

DSC 7978

So, is that it? Do we have to either submit to a higher power, or be tossed around by pure chance?

DSC 7360

Sometimes, for a few seconds, this koan has an answer.

DSC 7459

Journey

When discussing the options for traveling with a three weeks old baby from California to Indiana, friend Bryce reminded me that while today we view traveling as the unavoidable side effect when to get from A to B, there used to be a more conscious form of travel that one can metaphorize as a journey. Thrilled, we decided to take this trip by train. The idea was to spend two nights in a sleeper car, and the days sightseeing.

DSCF0006

The comfort is minimal, but so are the demands of a three week old.

DSCF0021

California becomes Nevada. Notice the difference in architecture and functionality (railway station vs. correctional facility).

DSCF0028

Nevada becomes Utah and Colorado.

DSCF0066

Then, in Iowa, when we start feeling the heat and humidity of summer in the midwest, the power of all passenger cars fail. For hours, the Amtrak personal shuffles the cars in order to put the one with the faulty cable at the end. In vain.

DSCF0076

When we arrive in Chicago 8 hours late in the third night, Amtrak pays for a hotel with view.

DSCF0085

We have arrived! Moral: Each journey should result in a story.

Vegetation (Iceland XIII)

This post is about ignorance. While I like plants, I know next to nothing about them, with the possible exception of cacti.
Moreover, I wan not prepared to encounter any interesting plants in Iceland at all. If I get the chance for a second visit, I’ll pack a macro lens. Let’s begin with Pinguicula vulgaris, the common butterwort. This is the second carnivorous plant appearing on this blog.

DSC 7420

The next one is the minuartia arctica, or the arctic sandwort. The german derivative of the old english wyrte is -wurz, which also appears and connotes with Gewürz, meaning spice. I haven’t tasted any of these.

DSC 7404

The previous ignorances could be covered up thanks to Google image search. The next one, which I find particularly pretty, I am clueless about. The blossoms were not more then 3-5mm in diameter. Help!
DSC 7615 2

Things get more complicated. Of course, it is not the actual plant is a soulful being that interests me, but rather its idea as a shape forming entity. Like so:

DSC 8141

These grow on the stunning black sand beaches. Because of the harshness of the environment, I suppose, the plants in Iceland are more exposed. While in lusher zones, the abundance of growth (and decay) is also camouflage, here, where there is nowhere to hide, everything becomes subject.

DSC 7895

World Cat Show in Novi, Michigan, 2013

In November 2013, my cat addicted daughter and I went on a trip to Novi, Michigan, to the World Championship Cat Show.

DSC 4482

What you see there are not the typical neighborhood alley cats, nor your (my) regular neighbors.

DSC 4533

The bond that apparently forms between two and four legged animals reminds me of what Albert Camus says in L’Étranger about the old neighbor and his dog: “À force de vivre avec lui, seuls tous les deux dans une petite chambre, le vieux Salamano a fini par lui ressembler.”

DSC 4844

What might I look like in a decade or so after living with that lovely Persian cat up above…
I have the feeling that the Birman down below would allow me an easier transition.

DSC 4755

It seems that all the efforts we humans have made to create special cat (or dog) breeds are only a feeble attempt to help us with our own transformations.

Clouds (Iceland XII)

Most places have their own very distinctive appearance of clouds. Landscape painters know this and therefore prefer to live close to the ocean or the mountains. Needless to say, clouds in the midwest are either dull or very dangerous.

DSC 7562

Iceland has both ocean and mountains so that one can expect the best of the best.

DSC 7966

When I was little they told us in school that life forms can be distinguished from lifeless matter by a few criteria: Ability to move, react to the environment, and reproduce. Clouds can do all that.

DSC 8611

So I started thinking that being a cloud might be an interesting way to live.

DSC 8962

Unfortunately, the only cloud based life forms in the near future will most likely be rather virtual.

DSC 8977

Djúpalónssandur (Iceland IX)

Djúpalónssandur is a rocky beach in the southwestern corner of the Snæfellsjökull National Park.

DSC 8844

Besides its historical significance of an old fishing port (of which only the remains of a few huts are visible), it features bizarre lava rock formations.

DSC 9233

The grassy slopes of the Snæfellsjökull seem to just break off into the sea, as if the landscape builder left his work unfinished.

DSC 9163

If fire could solidify, it would look like this.

DSC 9230

Hell (Iceland VIII)

After Plato had the brilliant idea to use a hypothetical reward system in an equally hypothetical afterlife as the ethical foundation of a functioning society, it didn’t take long until picturesque ideas about how the rewards might look like started to spread.

DSC 9375

Unsurprisingly, the focus was not so much on positive rewards like eternal bliss, but rather on the peculiarities of punishments.

DSC 9335

The Seltún Geothermal Area near Reykjavik provides at least the mandatory ambience of heat and stench.

DSC 9342

There are even indications of horned minions ready to pull you under. Clearly, the ground is treacherous here.

DSC 9330

Why is it that we take delight in all this unpleasantness?

DSC 9354

Hraunfossar (Iceland VII)

Iceland has a lot of water falls. It is so bad that you shrug off the ones that would be worth a day trip at home, (almost) no matter where you live.

DSC 8432

Of the few that we saw this summer (in 2015), my favorite was not among the big ones.
We had just pulled into a parking lot by chance, and 3 minutes away from the road, I couldn’t but smile.

DSC 8470

This was not a single waterfall, but literally hundreds of little ones on the far side of the Hvítá river.
The falls originate from many separate springs in the lava field in the back.
It felt like the elves had been practicing here before they started to work on the big ones.

DSC 8440

Each single fall is a masterpiece that dances among companions.

DSC 8473

Black, Green, and White (Iceland VI)

Googling for Black, Green, and White leads to some interesting things. There is black, green, and white tea, of course (to my delight). There are black, green, and white wires that puzzle some hobby electricians. Then there are some countries that have these colors in their flags. Iceland should be one of them, but isn’t.

DSC 8115

Green is not only the color of the moss that covers the older lava fields. You have it with the algae

DSC 8790

and the shrubs,

DSC 8462

always contrasted by water, sky, and earth. The simplicity of the color pattern is contrasted by an astounding complexity and diversity of the landscape.

DSC 7411

Much of earth must have looked like that before man, and maybe will look like that again.

DSC 8219