South Station at the intersection of South St. and Atlantic Ave is one of Boston’s many landmark buildings. I took several photos that show more of the building, but none of them are worth posting, so I stuck with this image of the main entrance to the station. The entrance way today looks much as it did when South Station first opened in 1899. Completing this representation of urban America in 2022 is the ubiquitous homeless person with her worldly goods on a cart to the left of the center entrance. In a country as rich as the United States, there is just no excuse for the legions of indigent homeless trying to eke out an existence in our cities. You are a disgrace, America.
I returned to Vietnam last week from a one month visit to the United States, my first trip in three years. It was great to see family and friends in Petaluma, California, Boston and Amherst, Massachusetts, New York City, Baltimore, and the Denver area. That said, and while the US is the country of my birth, I am glad I no longer live there. The United States has too much tension, anxiety, and simmering anger for my taste. Life where I am in Vietnam is a good deal more relaxed and laid back.
Boston’s Old State House served as the seat of the Massachusetts colonial government from 1713 to 1776 and, after the American revolution, was the seat of the state government until 1798. Now hemmed in by office towers in downtown Boston, this national and Boston historic landmark is the city’s oldest surviving public building.
After walking to the big open area in the center of the main Angkor Wat temple, this stunning building, which cannot be seen from inside the temple, is off to the left (with the temple entrance at your back) and through a couple of doors. In front of where I stood to take this photo, there is stairway down to the grass area. I found a map of the Angkor Wat temple complex online that labelled this structure the North Gallery. That name does not really reveal what the function of this building was.
I just spent a week in Siem Reap (Cambodia) and this gave me a chance to revisit some of the sites that are part of the vast Angkor Wat temple complex just outside of the city. Angkor is a truly magical, awe-inspiring place. I was with my brother visiting from the US on my first trip in 2018 – we hired a licensed guide and heard a great deal about the temples we visited. How much of this was part of the historical record and how much was fanciful is for someone other than me to know. In any case for this visit, I teamed up with my friend Ansel living in Siem Reap these days. We dispensed with a guide in favor of our cameras. We walked and climbed around several temples and shot a lot of photos, only a few of which, in my case, will see the light of day.
On our first day out, we headed for the main Angkor Wat temple, arriving before six in the morning, hoping to get one of those iconic images of the sun rising behind the famous domes of the main temple. Instead, we got a mostly cloudy sky with a bit of patchy sunshine. The light was actually lovely, but there were no sunrise shots, much less spectacular ones.
The image here spent a good deal of time in the digital darkroom. The sun was behind and to the right of the entrance way to the temple. The original raw file showed the foreground temple building in deep, almost black, shadow against a washed out, almost white, sky in the background. Fortunately raw files allow significant adjustments of shadow and highlight areas without compromising image quality beyond repair – I shoot all raw for this reason. There are, however, limits to what even a raw file can take, and this image is at the borderline. The front of the temple has a lot of digital noise to the detriment of clear, sharp details. But for a small, compressed jpeg image, quality is still acceptable.
An attached house in a small, densely populated neighborhood, part of Saigon’s urban core. Actually, I’m not sure what the correct term is for this kind of residential unit. This home is part of a row of similar units, and there is another row directly on top of this one. Across a narrow lane, there are two more rows of units, one on top of the other. (See the preceding photo post to get the idea.) The families living in this neighborhood almost certainly own their homes, though calling these condos would be misleading at best. Words like apartment or flat suggest rentals, so I settled on attached house, for better or worse. There may be a Vietnamese word that describes this kind of housing, but I don’t know what it might be.
Erected by Chinese from Guangzhou in southern China, and first opened around 1760, the Ba Thien Hau Temple – actually the official name of the site is Ba Thien Hau Pagoda (Chùa Bà Thiên Hậu) – is located in Saigon’s Cholon area. It is a place of worship for Mazu, who is recognized by some Chinese as the Goddess of the Sea.
Chinatown in Saigon is called Chợ Lớn in Vietnamese, which translated means literally “big market” and becomes simply Cholon in English. I visited Cholon for the first time recently with my friend Mark, mostly in search of good Chinese food and to get a feel for the area. I am not sure what I was expecting, but visually Cholon does not look much different than other neighborhoods in Saigon. Bi-lingual Vietnamese-Chinese signage was the most noticeable tipoff that the area has a lot of Vietnamese Chinese living there. Unlike parts of Bangkok or Panang in Malaysia, I heard no Chinese being spoken when walking around. Cholon may have a lot of ethnically Chinese people, but today they are a part of Vietnamese society. They are not recent arrivals; their ancestors came to Saigon decades or hundreds of years ago.
The several Chinese association or meeting halls (會館) that dot Cholon were distinctly Chinese, both in terms of ambience and architecturally (though the dragons on the roof are definitely Vietnamese style). The one pictured here is the Ha Chuong Meeting Hall (Hội quán Hà Chương in Vietnamese and 霞漳會館 in Chinese). Meeting halls similar to this one set up by Chinese traders and immigrants were established in numerous cities in Southeast Asia. The Ha Chuong hall was founded early in the 1800s by people from Fujian province located along the southeastern coast of Chinese. The founders may have been Hakka people (客家) from Fujian, though I am not sure. In any case, the hall served as a place for people from Fujian to meet, conduct business, and worship. In fact, I sometimes see these halls are referred to as “pagodas” or “temples” in English, though the use of words like these seems a bit misleading to me. People go to places like Ha Chuong hall to burn incense and pray, and this may be the principal reason people come to such places today, but that definitely was not the only function of these halls when they were established. It was unclear what, if any, religious affiliation the Ha Chuong hall has. It was certainly not Buddhist, more likely Taoist or Confucian or a mix of the two.
Yesterday was the first full moon of the new lunar year, and the final day of the traditional Tết celebration in Vietnam. This small shrine near my home was decorated with flowers for Tết.
