It’s cherry blossom season and I can’t believe these ones are blooming just outside our doorstep. Sometimes the smallest things can make me feel so rich. Thankful for Spring, a season of new beginnings.
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photography
“His death was quiet, like rain on the sea.” – Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Light is best before or after a storm. I still can’t believe how beautiful this photo turned out, considering how quickly the sky turned stormy and dark. It’s one of my favorite travel photographs.
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It’s our last day in Kauai. It’s been a long, languid week of sea, sun and jungle rain. Time passes slowly here on this five million year old island, where it rains more than any other place on earth. People are friendlier, they smile more easily, they seem happier. To live simply, in God’s Green Isle, must really be good for the soul.
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For as long as I can remember, our family vacations were spent in cars, journeying across Western Canada and the US. Trips to Airdrie, Banff, Drumheller and Edmonton became monthly rituals. We found every excuse to get in the car and just ride. I remember weekly trips to Mackay’s Ice Cream in Cochraine after Sunday mass. We’d pass the wealthy neighborhoods of Bearspaw and Springbank, with their large acreages and golf courses. I’d daydream about living in one of those big houses one day, with a yard big enough for a trampoline. I think we enjoyed the drive up more than the ice cream cones, in the end.
Our first big road trip was in 1991 when we drove from Calgary to Vancouver in a grey, rusty 1985 Honda Civic that my dad bought used when we first moved to Toronto. I don’t remember how hot it was without air-conditioning (the car didn’t have it) and I don’t remember how many hours we spent in that back seat (eleven, to be exact). What I do remember is how thrilling it was to watch the prairies turn into rockies, the rockies into pine forests and pine forests to big city lights. The hours passed quickly. My brother and I would look out for caribou, deer, elk, beaver. We’d make up songs, play road-trip bingo, recite stories about the cowboy lives we could be living out in the wilderness. We discovered the world through the windows of our little car, with the wind whipping in our hair, the radio blasting, cheese curls and Fruit Loops in our laps. We drove to Seattle, Las Vegas, Disneyland, San Diego and even Tijuana in that little un-airconditioned Honda.
Soon, we upgraded to a van – a wild berry colored Chrysler Grand Voyager, with a maroon interior and bucket seats. It had room enough for Bope’s (the hamster’s) cage, all the food we could want, pillows, blankets and several weeks worth of luggage. The road trips became ritual then. We visited Banff every weekend and if not, we’d go find some other place to drive to: strawberry orchards, Glacier National Park, Jasper, Kananaskis. My fondest memories were of rainy evenings driving through the rockies, the windshield wipers swiping to the beat of Tina Turner’s Greatest Hits. I know every word to every song in that casette tape. And if not Tina Turner, it was Kenny Rogers.
This past week, we paid homage to our family road trip traditions while on vacation in Maui. Instead of day-long beach escapades and snorkel trips, we drove the lush jungles of the Hana Highway all the way round to Kipahulu’s barren fields. We drove the misty up-country roads of the Makawao Forest Reserve and winded our way up to Haleakala National Park. With the roads mostly to ourselves, we had ample time to visit volcanic beaches and red clay canyons along the way. We passed cattle grazing on the highway, stopped at road-side trailers for bites to eat, explored two hundred year old churches that time forgot. And in true form, the three of us often fell asleep to leave Dad at the helm. Minus the hamster cage and Fruit Loops, it felt like we’d traveled back in time for a few days. Just us, our car and the wide open road ahead.
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Some walls are just too beautiful to photograph bare. Sometimes, you need subjects that can make a statement, subjects that can bring a wall to life.
This was taken in Hoxton Square Bar, a treasure of a place in one of London’s trendiest post codes. Vaulted ceilings, dimmed cave-like lighting, industrial walls and floors. It’s as if it were designed by a true artist: the cavernous room his canvas, and the bodies inside his paint. Every shadow and angle can be a photograph. Dark corners, chiseled profiles, grainy shadows that inspire a girl to write.
A kiss was the only option here. Passion the only way to compete with Grande.
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It’s a hot September Saturday in the “capital of the world” and in just a few days, I’ll be bidding farewell and boarding a plane back stateside. Every time I leave London, a little piece of my heart breaks. I love and loathe this place like an ex-boyfriend that will forever haunt me in my sleep. Too many epic memories to cherish, one too many differences left unresolved. It’s the city of dreams and possibility, heartache and loneliness, the too-beautiful lover that captivates you the way delicate young women can drive old men mad. London is a city that cannot be tamed. It will never be mine.
Friends, relatives, writers and poets have attempted to capture the essence of this place and every time they do, I learn something new. A chance encounter with a new-found friend today had us talking about London’s amazing ability to give the gift of appreciation. In the absence of open spaces and quiet corners, you somehow find a gratitude for these exact things that you took for granted back home. Abundance from the void.
Barbara Chandler’s Love London is a visual account of the city captured through a series of film photographs and a collection of quotes. I’ve perused it now for over a week and each time I do, I am captivated not only by her ability to present this city in its rawest form (grimy, beautiful, crowded and grande), but also by the places she chose to feature in her collection. She’s presenting a London that is quintessentially hers but also a city that I feel can be mine, yours, theirs, everyones. I recognize the monuments, the bridges, the murals, the buildings in her book and instantly feel a kinship with her, the photographer behind the lens. It is not a tour guide, nor is it a travel book. Neither is it a collection of pretty postcard photographs that you find at the train station or the airport. Actually, at first glance, the images are not stunningly impressive nor conventionally beautiful. But look closer and you’ll find the book’s voice. Love London is a Londoner’s testimony. It’s an attempt to vindicate the roughness and softness of this city we’ve called home.
How delighted I was to see Barbara’s perspective of the SCARY mural that I stumbled upon in East London just a few weeks ago, her photograph somehow validating my need to take mine. Her London vindicating my London.
But perhaps what enamors me most of all is the collection of quotes included in the book: so eerily relatable, they give me pause.
“You may be alone and in Company at the same time.” – Henry Fielding (p. 164)
” [In London] love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.” – Henry Fielding (p. 142)
“The parks are the lungs of London.” – William Pitt (p.120)
“London is far more difficult to see properly than any other place.” – G.K. Chesterton (p. 116)
“She [London] is just like a vast ocean where sardines as well as whales are living together.” – Yoshio Markino (p. 101)
“…it was a good place for getting lost in, a city no-one ever knew.” – V.S. Naipul (p. 92)
“This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost … walk through its streets perpetually.” – W.B. Yeats (p. 71)
Page after page, a feeling of nostalgia hits me. The grain in her images, the out-of-focus portraits, the ugly beauty of the not-so-glamorous corners of this town. All of it presents a London that is real. Unpolished, grey, chaotic, hard. Just like mad blind love can be.
Suddenly, my London experience doesn’t feel so existential. Love London vindicates my complicated love for this city of dreams.
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A friend once told me that you can live a thousand lives in London and still not discover every nook and cranny of the place. Sure enough, I was reminded of this a few days ago after a work meeting when we wandered into Shoreditch, a too-cool-for-me neighborhood in East London.
There’s a new, industrial, hole-in-the-wall ad agency around every corner, and boutique shops and coffee houses with patrons that look like they’ve come straight out of Rolling Stone magazine. One minute you see a punk-rock ballerina with blonde hair, pink tank and polka-dot tutu saunter across the street and the next minute a mirror image of Lucille Ball from I Love Lucy walks outside to have a smoke, curlers still in her hair. And every single time I land in this borough I can’t help but feel like I don’t quite belong. Actually, I feel like a fish out of water. But that’s what London is. A city full of surprises.
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I’m in London for the next few weeks and it feels like deja vu from last summer. August in this crazy city I used to call home. It feels different these days; a stronger hint of violence in the air, a little more crowded and chaotic, people less available and more hurried than before. It has changed. Or maybe I have changed.
A few days before I flew out, I was having lunch with a friend who had the opportunity to transfer here for work for six months. We mused about London as if it were an old lover, our voices laced with desperate longing as we spoke about our old haunts, past friends, and the pure, addictive energy of the place.
I lived my twenties here. The weeks were novel and sleepless. I’ve never played and worked so hard in my life. There was always a new friend to meet, another new destination to visit.
These days, I meander the city with a quieter peace inside me. Sometimes I can’t decide if cities shape people or the other way around. I feel like I’ve experienced it both ways. Today, I see past the big monuments, touristy red phone booths and new hipster hangouts. These days, I notice the subtle beauties that sit quietly on the fringes.
This wall, for example, sits behind Guy’s Hospital near London Bridge tube station. I think it’s meant to hide the hospital boiler room. I’ve walked by here countless times during previous visits and hardly noticed a thing. How great is the texture of this wall? And how amazing that it sits in an anonymous street in the back alley of an ugly old hospital? So great.
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When I first moved to Europe, my first “exotic” trip outside of London was to Istanbul. It is one of the most enchanting cities I’ve visited, with its beautiful mosques and towering minarets. I remembering staying at the Swissotel Istanbul and being spoiled with Turkish delights every single night with a view of the Bosphorus Bridge from my window.
Istanbul sits on the border of Europe and Asia – literally. Crossing the Bosphorus Strait finds you standing in the other continent. This means that the people, food, culture and language is a rich mixture of East and West. It is one of the most exotic places in the world.
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