Ohh, I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front. No Particular reason..mostly just ennui and observation.
Today, though, given as how some 500,000 folks in red shirts are marching on distant parts of Bangkok (and the panic stricken western travel alerts..how many tourists have been robbed, raped and murdered in fair NZ in recent years? Quite a number. And given the 150 million odd tourists here over the past decade, how many here? Not many, if any…), I thought I’d throw up a couple of images of this city.
The first comes from a selection of 35m slides my father took around the world between 1955 and 1975. They’re taken in places as far apart as London, DC, Katmandu, Saigon and much more. They sat on a shelf at my parents house for decades, waiting for digitalisation to arrive, or scanners that make process easy. There are hundreds, maybe a thousand or so and I’ll toss a few up here from time to time.
I realised that they, as much as anything, document a big part of what I am and why I need to do the things I do. I sat and gazed at these things endlessly as a kid…it was our big Sunday thing to bring out the projector and look at dad’s slides.
So, just as a taster, this is the corner of Thanon Sukhumvit and Soi 4 in January 1973:
and here is the same spot in March, 2010, the biggest change being the Skytrain that dominates the street now (and the complete urban renewal..there are no buildings I can see in the first, still in the 2nd):
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