Tag: historical site

Big Ben Oversees Parliament Square

My first visit ever to London. I emerged from the Westminster tube station shortly before noon on a heavily overcast Saturday morning. I was with two of my dearest friends from the US, a couple from Cambridge, Mass, and we were on our way to Westminster Abbey. We had decided to meet in London, because I am not inclined to visit the US while Trump and his crime family loot and destroy everything they can get their hands on, and my friends were happy to escape the US for a few days of catching up and hanging out in one of the world’s great cities. As we walked over to nearby Westminster Abbey, strolling and chatting definitely took precedence over searching for the perfect angle to get a photo of Big Ben. We all took a few shots of Parliament Square for the travel scrapbook and that was pretty much the end of it.

Big Ben and its surroundings are one of the most photographed urban landscapes anywhere in the world. Even if you arrive on a perfect day with magnificent natural lighting and have plenty of time to explore vantage points and shooting angles, your odds of coming up with an image that says something unique or new about Big Ben are very long indeed. When I visit places like Big Ben and Parliament Square in London, I am looking for sharp, properly exposed, and well-composed images that say “I’ve been there.” If one of my images has something that sets it apart from vacation scrapbook cliches; well, I can live with that.

Back home and looking through the pictures from the walk, I decided the photo above did a reasonable job of summarizing my trip to Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. Saturday tourists and a few Londoners going about their business add some motion in the foreground while a tired Churchill leans on his cane next to Big Ben, and all framed by an ominous gray sky.

When we emerged from Westminster Abbey several hours later, the clouds had gone from ominous to puffy white and the scene was bathed in warm sunshine.

Altogether a successful outcome for the day: Big Ben photos now have a place in my travel scrapbook and I have great memories of a delightful day in London.

Medieval Gothic Extravagance

The exterior of the Basilica of the Holy Blood, next to Bruges City Hall in Burg Square, does not really look much like a church from the outside. There were people, obviously of the tourist persuasion, walking up a few stairs and through an entrance way; I was curious and followed them in. Inside, I saw a sign identifying the place at the foot of more stairs. I headed up and eventually walked into the remarkable main chapel, the Gothic style of which is somewhat unlike anything I have seen in the many churches I have visited over the years. Apparently, the church is home to a relic of the Holy Blood that a couple of bozos brought back from the Holy Land at some point. Make whatever you want of that. The church was built in the 12th century.

Amsterdam Glows in the Morning

I was at the beginning of a walk that would take me to Amsterdam’s botanical garden and the small but lovely Wertheimpark when I walked into this image. Thinking back, it seems to me the walk had a specific destination, but a month later sitting in Hoi An, I cannot remember what that might have been. The sun was still low in the sky at 7:30 in the morning; the light on the tree and the water literally glowed. The dome of St. Nicholas Church is in the center of the photo. Amsterdam is genuinely a beautiful place.

Though I did not know it at the time, I was standing on the historic Armbrug bridge when I took this photo. The original bridge dates back to 1538; the current bridge, the product of a renovation undertaken in 1988, is not particularly memorable. I happened to run across the history of the bridge when I decided to post the image above and went looking for where I was standing when I took the photo. Not that anyone has asked, but as a point of information, I use an application called Mapy.com when I do map searches online. While Google Maps is better for finding nearby restaurants, unlike Mapy, it had nothing about the Armbrug bridge. In fact when it comes to using a map as a map, Mapy comes out ahead of Google in virtually every respect. Developed and headquartered in the Czech Republic, Mapy has Android and Apple apps, and works fine on my Windows PC. Fed up dealing with criminal organizations like Google? Check out Mapy. And that is today’s unsolicited advertisement.

Hans Tausen House, Ribe, Denmark

The 16th century Hans Tausen’s House was part of the residence of bishops seated at the Ribe Cathedral. It is located in the village square facing the cathedral.

Hans Tausen, bishop of Ribe from 1542 to 1561, was a well-known reformer in the Lutheran church. He translated the Bible into Danish.

The Old Town Hall, Ribe, Denmark

The old town hall of Ribe pictured in part here is in the center of the old village near the town square and Ribe Cathedral. The original town hall on this site was built in 1496, though it is not clear to me whether the building pictured here is the original structure or a newer one. Today the old town hall houses a museum that I did not visit and occasionally hosts local weddings.

Mostly I like the colors and textures in this image: the wall with old and new red brickwork, the wooden door with its wrought iron decorations, granite foundation stones of grays and browns, and cobblestones in the foreground. The street light in front of the building casts a shadow giving the image depth.

Copenhagen’s Iconic Nyhavn Canal

The iconic – or cliche – it’s your choice – photo of Copenhagen invariably shows a row colorful buildings along the Nyhavn. I had always assumed that Nyhvan was a Copenhagen neighborhood featuring a lot of colorful architecture. As usual, on this trip, I did not do enough homework about the places I would visit before showing up at the scene. In fact Nyhvan is a canal commissioned by the Danish King Christian V and completed in 1675. The Nyhvan let ships unload trade goods and fish in Kongens Nytrov (Kings Square), an area at the end of the canal also developed by Christian V, who did a great deal to expand Copenhagen during his reign. In any event, it is only the roughly 300m waterfront of the Nyhvan Canal that is lined with colored buildings and this appears to be the only place such buildings are to be found in Copenhagen.

Over time, as ocean-going ships became larger, only smaller ships engaged in local trade came into the canal. By the mid-20th century even this trade had declined and there were no ships visiting Nyhavn. Efforts to revitalize the canal began in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, in addition to traditional buildings of many colors, there are several old sailing vessels moored to the piers along the waterway. The entire Nyhavn canal area serves as a sort of outdoor museum for Copenhagen.

My own Nyhavn colorful buildings cliche photo was taken on a gray, overcast morning; the light was very flat. If I had been paying more attention to content and less to exposure and color in the flat light, I probably would have chosen a group of buildings that did not include a Chinese restaurant. The place seems a little incongruous in a photo that is supposed to be representative of traditional Copenhagen.

I took the photo below with my back to the buildings in the photo above. It shows some of the sailing ships docked in the canal, and gives more sense of the overall look of the Nyhavn area. This was taken on the day after my first visit to Nyhavn. I stopped briefly on my way to another part of Copenhagen to get a photo of the old boats docked along the canal. The morning offered up some hazy sunlight that gives the entire scene a bit of a glow.

The Belfry of Bruges, Belgium

Belgium just happens to be on my mind right about now, so I decided to take a break from Denmark and the Danes today.

Bruges was the first city in northern Europe visited by merchant vessels from Genoa in the 13th century, becoming the endpoint of seaborne trade going through the Straits of Gibraltar, along the eastern Atlantic coastline, and through the English Channel to the low countries in the north. Today much of the center of old Bruges is a beautifully preserved UNESCO World Heritage site drawing tourists from all over Europe. The Belfry, visible from everywhere in the old city, stands in the Grote Markt in the center of Bruges.

As for Belgium being on my mind, I just finished watching that country’s national team defeat the US team 4 to 1 in a World Cup football match. While I sympathize with the US players who now have to come to terms with being beaten and knocked out of the World Cup competition, I can’t say I am put out or upset that the US lost. Given the performance of the garbage representing our country right now, the US does not deserve to win any accolades these days. It is as simple as that.

Belgium moves on to a Quarterfinal match with Spain on 11 July.

The Ribe Cathedral, Denmark

A number of online travel guides bill Ribe, a town on Denmark’s west coast with a few more than 8000 inhabitants, as Denmark’s oldest town. This is very likely the case as Ribe was already a center of commerce and trade early in the 8th century during the age of the Vikings, and people have lived in the village continuously since then.

With its beautifully preserved and restored buildings in a quiet village setting, today Ribe is a popular tourist destination for Danes, Germans, and other Europeans. The Ribe Cathedral sits at the center of the old town square and dominates its surroundings. The first church in Ribe, built of wood, was founded in 860 and apparently at that time a community of Christians lived together in Ribe with the pagan Vikings. The first stone church on the site was completed in the 12th century. Begun as a Roman Catholic church, today the cathedral is part of the Church of Denmark, which I think is a flavor of the Lutheran denomination. If Wikipedia is any guide, the history of the cathedral, from inception to today, is a tale of sectarian strife, conflict, and mayhem, the bread and butter of religion as far as I am concerned, accompanied by fires and other natural disasters.

Be that as it may, I readily admit that I am fascinated with church architecture. The amount of thought, creative energy, devotion, and monumentally difficult labor that went into building and adorning ancient and medieval churches is downright astonishing.

Mỹ Sơn: Legacy of the Cham People

About one hour to the west of Hoi An, the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mỹ Sơn, was an important religious center of the Cham people. The earliest Cham settlements in what is now central and southern Vietnam date back to the 3rd century CE. At some point early in their history, the Cham came into contact with Hinduism and adopted some variant of that religion. While there is debate about the extent to which the Cham in Vietnam were a unified kingdom, there is no question that Cham polities functioned throughout much of Vietnam for hundreds of years. They were traders and seafarers – Hoi An was originally a Cham port city and trading center – who developed a sophisticated civilization that presented formidable challenges to the Vietnamese living in the northern part of today’s Vietnam. For many years, there were ongoing conflicts and wars between the Cham and the Vietnamese. As the Vietnamese moved south, they eventually overran the Cham and absorbed their culture, though it was not until the 19th century that the last Cham enclaves were subdued.

Vietnamese friends have told me that the Cham people have been completely assimilated into the Vietnamese nation. While I suspect that is largely true, I have read that there is still a small, distinctly Cham ethnic minority in the country. How and to what extent Cham culture and customs have influenced the development of Vietnamese culture, I simply do not know enough about the very complex history of interaction between to two peoples to comment.

I have made two trips to My Son. The first time I went, it was a cloudy gray day. The second time I went, it was a cloudy and raining gray day. The photo above is from my second visit in November of 2024.

Temple on a Mountainside, Kyoto

Located in the foothills around Mt. Otowa to the east of Kyoto, Kiyomizu-dera Temple overlooks modern Kyoto. The temple was established in 788 CE during Japan’s Nara period, and affiliated with the venerable Hosso sect of Japanese Buddhism. Today, the monks caring for Kiyomizu-dera belong to the Kita-Hosso sect. Taken from the balcony of one of the smaller halls, this image shows the temple’s Main Hall and the pagoda in the entrance area on the far right with the city of Kyoto in the distance.

The West Gate is in the foreground with the temple’s pagoda directly in back. I am facing due east at 9:00am on an overcast morning. Why I have no photo of the larger, more impressive main gate to Kiyomizu-dera just to the left of where I am standing to take this photo is absolutely beyond me. I do, however, have a photo showing part of the main gate taken from inside the entrance with Kyoto in the distance. To the west, some blue sky has broken through the clouds.

For awhile it appeared that the day would become bright and sunny as the photos of the pagoda above and, below, of the West Gate from inside the entrance to Kiyomizu-dera suggest.

Kiyomizu-dera’s Main Hall sits on a steep incline and is supported by a wooden trellis that sets the building’s platform some 13 meters above the base of the incline below. My photo of the Main Hall does not really do justice to the building itself because I am distracted by the size of the crowd on the platform. It is no surprise that crowds of people want to visit a site like Kiyomizu-dera with its magnificent examples of Japanese temple architecture in a beautiful setting offering breathtaking views of its surroundings. I am taking the photo below at 9:45 in the morning on any old Tuesday in October. The crowd is bound to be larger by midday, and one can only imagine what happens on weekends or holidays. It is no wonder that some locales are instituting reservation systems that allow access at a specific time on a given day for popular sites with high volumes of visitors. If they are not in Japan already I would not be at all surprised to see such reservations systems arriving soon in Kyoto and elsewhere in the country. With literally billions of people able to afford relatively low-cost flights and budget tours, the problem of unsustainable over-tourism is not likely to get better in the foreseeable future.

A short way up the hillside from the main temple area, this small pagoda overlooks the Main Hall. By this time the clouds had returned and there was not much sunshine left. I did not make it all the way to the pagoda, instead turning to head down to the Otowa Waterfall at the base of the incline with the Main Hall at the top. Water is indeed falling from three pipes into a small pool, though Otowa is not what we generally think of as a waterfall. Be that as it may, Wikipedia tells us that Kiyomizu-dera means “pure water temple.” Those who drink a cupful of water from the falls are purified. I decided a single cup was unlikely to meet my needs for purification and kept on walking.

Despite the crowds of people, there were quiet spots and moments of peace for contemplation throughout the temple area.