Bogota's Gold Museum, El Museo del Oro, holds a stunning collection of pre-Columbian gold and other metals.
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Patan is said to be one of the oldest Buddhist cities in the world. It is also known as Lalitpur, which means the City of Beauty. The name recognises its tradition of arts and crafts which continue to define the city.
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When I travel I am always curious about the people who inhabit the places I visit. I seek to understand their way of life and observe how it differs from, or is similar to, my own. But there are other people who populate my travels, the people who ONCE lived in these lands.
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One of the (many) things I like to photograph when I travel are the various buildings I see. Buildings tell us so much about how people live, how they work, how they worship. Or, if they are old buildings, how they once lived/worked/worshipped.
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Strung out along a ridge in the Himalayan foothills lies the ancient town of Bandipur. It has only been fully accessible by road since 1998. The ridge is just 200 metres long and barely wide enough to accommodate the main street and the buildings that line it. Behind the houses the mountainside falls away steeply. The small market gardens farmed by the inhabitants are accessible only by steps cut into the hillside.
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In 1902 Charles Jones, Ealing’s borough surveyor, published a book. In it he referred to Ealing as the ‘Queen of Suburbs’. His aim of course was to promote the area as a place to live.
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In one corner of the room a small TV broadcasts news and propaganda. Photo albums on the table are full of reminders of happy family gatherings. Some medals are proudly displayed on a shelf, while the drinks cabinet holds treasured bottles of imported brands.
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What do you do with a load of monuments that celebrate a past you’d rather forget? You can haul them down and break them up for scrap perhaps. Or you can leave them where they are, a constant reminder of that troubled past. Or you can gather them up and put them in a museum; a museum that acknowledges and documents the past but doesn’t celebrate it.
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Is it ever OK to be late? It’s something I try my very best to avoid, but occasionally it can be a good thing, as in the case of Boris III of Bulgaria. This is the Hagia Nedelja church. The previous church on this spot was destroyed in a terrorist plot in 1925 to assassinate the king, Boris III. He was attending the funeral service of General Konstantin Georgiev, who had been killed in an assault two days previously, on 14 April of that year. The group from the Bulgarian Communist Party knew that in killing such a high powered…
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You must have been living on Mars, or as a hermit, not to have heard that Queen Elizabeth II passed away last week. Here in the UK we are in a period of official mourning such as most of us have never experienced. Whether you are a fervent monarchist, staunch republican or (like me) somewhere on a scale between those two extremes, it’s hard not to be fascinated by the sense of history that surrounds us right now.
