Summer is over. Second week of October is pretty late in the year to be saying this, but I wanted to be sure. We packed away the fan last weekend and I’d be surprised (and worried) if it needs to be assembled again before May. Overall, we got a cool and wet summer this year. The sort of summer even I can get behind, look back fondly on etc:
Despite years of wearing jackets with full-length zippers, the wife and I found ourselves struggling with zipping and unzipping while trying on new jackets at shops in the US. The wife pointed out that the Pull Tab and Slider were mounted on the right Chain while the jackets we’ve been wearing for the past few years in Amsterdam, have had them on the left.
While both countries drive on the right side of the road, the Americans went with the side of the road they drive on, whereas the Europeans chose the side where the steering wheel is. Why the two are different never made sense to me.
I still can’t believe that this simple change caused us to struggle with something we do hundreds of times a year.
The list of parts of a zipper on Wikipedia is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper#Components
Some movies manage to become the staple of in-flight entertainment. I discovered Edge of Tomorrow on a flight and it became an instant favourite of mine. I watched it a second time a year later on another flight (quite fitting for a movie with a time-loop narrative). A transatlantic flight last week - in a plane whose idea of in-flight entertainment system was tiny screens per 10 or so rows suspended from the roof of the plane - managed to slot it in between two runs of the latest Pirates of The Caribbean sequel. Perhaps because the movie came on when I was in that twilight between wakefulness and fitful airline sleep, it got me thinking about my other favourite movies and if they shared something in common with Edge of Tomorrow. The top three came down to:
Turns out they do have something in common - the protagonist(s) in all of them are up against highly intelligent alien or artificial life forms. They also play with time as a plot device (ok The Matrix not so much unless you count Bullet Time).
…as panels of an imaginary comic:
In June, days in Amsterdam stretch on for 16+ hours. The afternoon sun, even on partly-cloudy days when it’s a pleasant 23ºC outside, is blindingly bright. It takes my mind back to much hotter (40ºC+) and considerably lazier afternoons of school summer vacation spent binge-reading comics.
I came across an article in The New Yorker that prognosticates how Greenland would change as the global warming progresses and causes the years old ice sheets to melt. While it touches on many serious topics such as the race for mining for minerals and tensions with Denmark, this passage caught my attention:
Today, Greenland has fifty-six thousand residents, twelve thousand Internet connections, fifty farms, and, by American standards, no trees. (The native dwarf willows top out at about a foot.) One Greenlander I met, who’d recently left the island for the first time to attend a meeting in upstate New York, told me that his favorite part of the trip had been the noise of the wind sighing through the leaves.
“I love that sound,” he said. “Shoosh, shoosh.”
I realised the other day that since reading this article, I’ve been growing more appreciative of the sound trees make when their branches sway in the wind. With summer in Amsterdam at its peak, and the trees in the park covered in fresh leaves, they also make for a subject I find very calming to shoot - especially when it rains:
We walked through the warren of narrow streets in the old town in search of a place that’d serve us breakfast. Along the way we encountered several houses that were being repaired or renovated. It must take special skill to manoeuvre heavy construction equipment into these streets.
As someone who grew up in a crowded neighbourhood in a middle-class part of Delhi, the narrow streets were at once oddly familiar and completely alien. There were hardly any people around and nor were there any children playing street cricket.
After breakfast, we queued up outside Real Alcázar de Sevilla. The queue moved at a moderate pace and some 30 minutes later led us into a poorly lit room with ticket counters. Before we could buy the tickets, our bags had to go through an x-ray machine - much like the ones at airports.
Real Alcázar is complex of several buildings built over several centuries (between 11th and 16th) in the Moorish style. Some of these used to be administrative offices, others were living quarters of the royalty. Their walls were covered in colourful ceramic tiles while their arched entrances and roofs were covered in intricate floral and geometric patterns carved in plaster1.
The palace complex was also dotted with several gardens where countless orange trees were decked in, well, oranges2. In one garden, peahens and peacocks roamed freely.
The complex even had a bathhouse.
After spending a few hours hopping from building to building, we stepped out in search for the next landmark on our list - Plaza de España. Despite the offline map on our phone, we managed to lose our way. We were still in the historical center so we simply enjoyed the views till we managed to put ourselves back on track.
No amount of seeing pictures of Plaza de España on the Internet prepares you for its grandeur in real life. The building dates back to early 20th century and was built for the 1929 Ibireo-American exposition - a product of the same 19th century tradition of World’s Fairs and Expositions that gave us the Eiffel Tower. The building is semi-circular and is flanked by two impressive 74-meter high towers on either sides.
It is separated from a huge D-shaped courtyard in front by a moat. You can rent a small rowboat and go around in the moat. Several graceful, arched bridges with ceramic balustrades3 connect the courtyard to the building.
The sound of vendors selling castanets echoed through the building’s corridor regularly and kept reminding of not a piece of Flamenco music but of this Italian baroque aria:
I half expected a Baroque orchestra to join in but that was never going to happen…
As we were leaving, we spotted a Nikon DSLR lying on a bench in the courtyard. There is no entrance ticket to Plaza de Esnpaña as it’s basically a very grand public space that happens to be a tourist attraction. So there weren’t any ticket counters or officious looking liveried people that we could entrust the camera to. While we stood there wondering what to do, a middle aged lady with a worried look on her face came running to the bench. The moment she spotted the camera lying there, her concern turned into a big smile. She picked the camera and thanked us profusely. I felt a twinge of guilt for getting so genuinely thanked for our mere indecision.
After dinner we spent the evening walking through the main tourist/shopping district.
I was mildly amused by these ads outside a branch of Bankia Bank that pomised mortgages no matter how crazy your dream house was:
Thankfully, by the time we reached our apartment, I was too tired to dream up or of any crazy houses.
When I was a child, my sister received a board game as gift for her birthday. Before you played the game for the first time, you had to take oval stickers with colourful illustrations of rubies, opals, jades, diamonds etc. printed on them, and paste them on the shoulder (the place where the gem goes) of yellow plastic rings. The game was very imaginatively called ‘Rings on your fingers’. For some reason, the design of the roof in one of the chambers reminded me of this game - probably because the roof resembled illustration of one of the gems. I later read that the chamber bears the name ‘Patio de las Muñescas’ (Patio of the Dolls). Rodrigo Caro, a 17th century Spanish historian had speculated that this might be because children used to be raised here so perhaps the chamber triggering an obscure childhood memory isn’t all that odd…↩
These weren’t the kind you could eat - they are bitter and grown mostly for ornamentation. It doesn’t stop people from trying and leaving the half-eaten fruit around.↩
To be honest, I couldn’t ascertain if they were made of glazed ceramic, covered in curved ceramic tiles or merely painted over.↩
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