Vivid

The Vivid Sydney Festival, a new annual event for the city, is a celebration of light and music that features a new guest curator every year.  Last year, the inaugural festival boasted godfather of ambient music Brian Eno; this year, it's husband and wife team, Lou Reed (what a step down) and Laurie Anderson.  Throughout the month of music performances and art installations, major buildings in the city are splashed with rotating shades and shapes of light, and the white sails of the iconic Opera House are used as a blank canvas for projecting storeys-tall images.

On Saturday, I took my camera to Campbell's Cove to shoot a free performance on the harbour called "Fire Water," a cross-cultural combination of Aboriginal smoke ceremony and Bollywood-inspired dance interpreting the wreck of the Sydney Cove.  In 1797, the merchant ship sailed from Calcutta and sank off the coast of Tasmania.  The performance culminated with the arrival in the cove of a ghostly tall ship so fully rigged with ethereal blue and magenta lights as to seem constructed of light itself.

Festivities continued around the corner in The Rocks, the old historical part of Sydney, with the open-air night markets.  Beneath the undulating tent peaks I strolled between stalls selling smooth wooden bowls of redgum and coolibah, hip fashion and jewellery from Paris, tapered candles in pinks and oranges, framed photographs and rich-smelling specialty chocolates.  At the end of the stalls, a flamenco performance broke out.

A troupe from the local dance school El Duende Flamenco, led by a handsome Chinese woman in a fuschia frock and overseen by a Spanish matron, tapped, clapped and twirled to live flamenco guitar.  Half a dozen women in full-length frilled dresses with fans and castanets spun, flickered and clacked.  A man in a round, broad-rimmed hat and cumberbund clicked his heels, and a little girl of nine or ten stole the show when she fanned her dress and pleated her fan in a flamboyant solo.

The explosion of colours in the dresses and the lights were a photographer's candy store.  Check out some of my shots.

Photos: Montenegro

Montenegro 2009

I was going to do these photos in order, but I got bored with Bruges so jumped straight to Montenegro.

Damn bug.

It is almost four months since I returned to Sydney.  In that time I haven't at all started to think about my next trip, which I expect will be in 2011.

The next trip always begins with a spark.  A shot in a film, or something I read in a book or see on television.  Suddenly, my interest is piqued in a place.

Today I saw, on TV, Petra, Jordan.  Zap.

Continued delay.

Stand by.

Photos update

I've been working my way through all my photos of Germany, and have gradually been adding them to my Germany folder. I've finished now, so if you haven't clicked that link below for a while, there might be some new things in there.

On to Bruges, next. It's a bit slow going, I admit, but I've been trying to work on some articles as well.

Photos: Germany

Germany 2009

Lack of Evidence

Yes, I know.  After five weeks I've still not posted any photos.  Rest assured, they're coming; I've been working on it.  I needed first to nail down the software for my photography workflow, since the digital darkroom requires a lot of organisation.  I decided on Adobe Lightroom.  I also have been trying to recover the shots of the bullfight from the corrupted card; unfortunately, no luck as yet.

Once my additional 1GB RAM and new solid state, lightning fast hard drive arrive, progress should also be faster.

I have selected several favourite shots, so will post something shortly to keep the bored amused.

The End

And now, the end of the 2009 European odyssey.

I am expecting the inevitable question: “Happy to be home?”  If it has to be yes or no, then it’s no.  I could keep going.  I would love to keep going.  Constant travelling is a little taxing, but I haven’t reached exhaustion.

Nevertheless, it will be a relief not to think about language anymore, to speak fluently and be understood.

All things end.  But this is only the end of the second chapter.  Good travel has three phases: the first is planning, when the possibilities excite and the anticipation builds; the second is execution, the trip itself, when plans come to fruition or lead in unexpected directions.

Now begins the synopsis.  Trawling through nine thousand photographs.  Developing.  Discarding.  Revisiting notes and blog entries, and assembling articles.  Digging out an old brochure to check the name of that church in Portugal, or a receipt to report the cost of a beer in Seville.  And beginning work on my next book of photography.

Over the coming months, as I select and develop my best photos, I will post them online.  Updates to this blog will be less frequent than they have been during the trip, but check back now and again to see what new photos are available.

Language

In major cities, it’s easy to get by with English.  Too easy.  Speaking foreign languages is one of the joys of travel.  Too many English-speaking tourists turn up in Venice or Paris and speak English.  You can't.  That's cheating.  Aussies are as guilty of this as Americans or the Brits.  You’ve got to make an effort.

But the effort does become draining, and the language barrier is isolating.  Spaniards are reticent to speak anything other than Spanish, and in provincial Andalucía you won’t get much else.  Luckily, my basis in French gets me by with Spanish, and it is probably my favourite language to try to speak.

In Bruges, English is so widely spoken it could be considered a second language after their Flemish Dutch (the national language of French is equally well-spoken, though pride is at stake due to wars with France).

Portugal and England share the oldest alliance in history, and English is widespread in urban areas of Portugal.  It is sporadic in rural areas.  The elderly, urban or rural, don't speak it at all.

My biggest surprise was Croatia, which easily has the most widespread English of all the countries I toured.  It is taught to children in school from young, and the standard is high.  This was a bit of a relief, because I have no knowledge of any Slavic language.  I was out of luck when I found that just over the border in Montenegro, English is not spoken at all, and I had to depend on my Croatian phrase book (for sensitive cultural and political reasons, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian are all officially different languages, but linguistically they are close dialects of the same language).

When I reached France, it was with a mixture of comfort and trepidation.  I actually speak a little bit of French, so I could have simple conversations.  But I also know enough grammar to know I’m getting my conjugation wrong or that I don’t know which participle to use.

Remembrance Day at Villers-Bretonneux

On 25 April 1918, at a cost of over 1,200 of their lives, Australian soldiers repulsed a German force apparently ten times their number at Villers-Bretonneux, the last point of defence before Paris on the Western Front.  The citizens of this little town declared their eternal gratitude to these men in a moving speech by the mayor.  The primary school, rebuilt with money raised by schoolchildren from Victoria—called the Victorian School—has emblazoned above its blackboards, “N’oublions jamais l’Australie”—we will never forget Australia.  And they never have; ANZAC Day is observed religiously to this day.  They dub the town l’Australie en Picardie, and it has been called by Australians the Gallipoli of the Western Front.
Remembrance Day, once known as Armistice Day, the last day of “the Great War,” is a national holiday in France.  This and the last day of The Second World War are of great importance to the French, as so much of their soil was battleground.  On November 11th, we visited the Australian National Memorial outside Villers-Bretonneux.  Several groups of Aussies trod softly past the sombre rows of graves either side of the French and Australian flags to reach the tall, white tower flanked by two chapels and a memorial wall engraved with the names of the Australian fallen in the battles of the First World War.  While we were there a French family with three young ones also paid their respects, the parents gently reprimanding the children when they became too boisterous.  We gave them little koala bears.