Changing seasons and cameras
Come October and the days in Amsterdam begin to get shorter. It’s the late, 8:30 AM sunrise that you notice first. Though with the sun still setting around 6:20 PM, it feels like a fair deal. Somewhere around the last week of October we shift the clocks back by an hour and pretend that the sun is rising early again. However, the planetary forces catch up pretty quickly and by the end of November the sun is again rising at 8:30 AM but this time setting even earlier at 4:30 PM. It’s all very beautiful when I am leaving for work, but on my way back, it’s already night.
Most days feel shorter than they are because of the weather. It’s usually foggy, cloudy and rainy here - all at the same time.
Clear days are a rarity, but when you do get them, they are incredibly beautiful…
…especially the evenings.
P.S. quite enjoying clicking with the new iPhone’s camera. I switched last year from the built-like-a-tank and heavy-as-one Canon 50D to a Sony NEX 5N. It was much lighter, supported interchangeable lenses and saved raw files with picture quality fairly close to that of an SLR. And with the bundled 16mm ‘pancake’ lens it felt almost pocketable. A year with the camera and I realise that ‘fairly close to an SLR’ and ‘almost pocketable’ are not the same as ‘SLR’ and ‘pocketable’. Worse, they are “the worst of both worlds” kind of compromises. I love the phone’s camera because I have no illusions about the quality (in a technical pixel-peeping sense of the word) of the pictures. And it’s not only pocketable, it’s always with me. Sure, I sometimes miss the creative options and the picture quality that an SLR affords. But I no longer regret not having a camera with me. Some compromises are actually good choices in disguise.
P.P.S. Unlike the last year, I didn’t miss Diwali at all. It’s the only festival I’ve ever cared about and just a year in another country has made me forget all about it.
Fado
Conçao1 Canção Do Mar (Song of the Sea) by Dulce Pontes was my introduction to Fado. The song featured in a scene of the movie Primal Fear. I fell in love with it the moment I heard it. Those were the pre-Internet days in India and I couldn’t locate a CD anywhere. I finally found it at a music shop at Schiphol while waiting for a connecting flight to the US a few years ago. The connection between Fado, me and Amsterdam came up again last year (some 8 years after I found the CD) when I caught a performance of Dulce Pontes live at the Concertgebouw.
Since then I’ve discovered other Fado artists that have reenforced my love for the music. I wanted to attend a live Fado performance at one of the Fado houses in Lisbon but that didn’t work out during this trip. We did however come across a band of student musicians that made beautiful music:
And thanks to all the walking we did in Alfama, I think I understand Fado a little better.
P.S. The graffiti in the first picture reminded me of Mario Miranda. Perhaps not surprising, given that Goa was a Portuguese Colony till 1961 (a good 14 years after the British left). I am constantly surprised at how much the history books in school omitted.
The trams of Lisbon
The number of tourists we saw photographing the trams in Lisbon made us wonder if the they were being kept running for their novelty value alone. Each time one of these rattling, yellow coaches would pass us by, we’d see a tourist crouching somewhere close by composing a shot with the excitement of a bird watcher who has come across a rare species after camping in a rainforest for a week. The more meticulous of the lot would wait patiently on busy routes.
Trams in Lisbon reminded me of those I’d seen in Kolkata, although I never sat on any in India. I do have a vague childhood recollection of visiting some city with tram tracks on the road. I remember my parents telling me that the tracks were for a special kind of bus that ran on electricity. The trams ran no more, but the tracks had persisted. I am not sure whether this is in fact a memory, a dream or a scene from a film, but the Kolkata encounter was definitely my first tram experience.
The trams, though in active use by locals and tourists alike, are definitely a relic from another time. Their interiors are largely wooden and the straps hanging from their ceiling often leather. The tracks have been laid on the same tarred (and often cobbled) roads that are used by other vehicles. Traffic either races ahead or follows them deferentially. Some streets are so narrow that people patiently stand with their backs to the wall to let trams pass.
I’ll never forget the ride we took late one night. The tram was reasonably busy at first, but as our journey progressed people kept alighting till there were just 4 of us left on the tram. The tram jerked as it strained to negotiate the steep uphill slope of Lisbon’s streets. I had my heart in my mouth and wondered if we were going to tumble backwards in a free fall, while the wife seemed to be having the time of her life. I tried to catch a glimpse of the driver’s face and the serene look conveyed that it was business as usual. The tram eventually came to a halt at a roundabout in a lonely neighbourhood. This was a chilly, moonlit, mid-March evening in Lisbon. We walked to the stop a few steps away and waited for our tram back. The ride this time wasn’t any less rattly but by accounting for it in advance, the mind had begun to discount it as normal.
P.S. The trams in Lisbon also come in red.
Cities old and new
We visited Lisbon in March this year but I never got a chance to write about the trip. Earlier this week, while browsing through the Dutch section at the Louvre, my thoughts strayed back to Lisbon. This 1670 painting by Jan van der Heyden depicts the Royal Palace at Dam Square:
dam-square-1670
It’s the same square I pass by every day on the way to office. Almost 350 years later, the square looks more or less the same and is still in active use. The city of Amsterdam endures on.
dam-square-2012
But what happens 1000 years from now? Will our big cities be still around or will they be ruins at the outskirts of the future city-centers? When in Rome last year, the traces of the Roman Civilization were all around me. Buildings in that city fell into disuse, were abandoned or demolished and new ones came up — sometimes just a few yards from the old ones. From the holes in the walls of Colosseum, I could see windows of buildings barely a few decades old:
colesium-old-and-new
Lisbon had spooked me a little because the old quarters of the city felt completely abandoned in patches. Many houses looked like no one had lived in them for years.
derelict-house-1
derelict-house-2
derelict-house-3
We saw a lot of repair work too but it seemed unable to keep up with the decay and degeneration.
repairs
a-street-in-lisbon-1
a-street-in-lisbon-2
a-street-in-lisbon-3
But then Lisbon is one of the oldest cities in Europe and all this might be quite normal for a city that is already thousands of years old.
P.S. In the Egyptology section at the Louvre, we saw an ordinary piece of parchment that looked like a section from a grocer’s balance sheet. What stories must it tell? Some of our ordinary, careless scribbles will show up in a museum thousands of year from now and scholars will agonize over them in search of some glimpse into our present times.
Walking in Amsterdam
I spend a lot of my weekends in Amsterdam simply walking around with my camera. I haven’t done much which the pictures that I’ve taken on these walks. Their only appeal is their immediacy, and by not posting them soon enough, I’ve ended up not posting them at all. I am trying to break that habit, and here are some from a walk yesterday evening:
Making connections when none exist
Christiaan Huygens, the famous 17th century astronomer, horologist and the inventor of the pendulum clock, was Dutch.
Orange is the national colour of the Netherlands.
This made me wonder if Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange had a Dutch connection.
One of the first made-up words I remember coming across in the book was the word for friends - droogs. The control panel of our dryer had the word droog in half the setting names. Droog, being the Dutch word for dry, needs no reason for being present in those quantities there.
In the light of this recent evidence (if it can be called that), my belief in the book’s Dutch connection grew stronger.
The Eye film institute recently hosted an exposition on life and works of Stanley Kubrick. They advertised it through a giant poster that covered an entire multi-storeyed building on the North Bank of the river IJ. They chose Alex, the protagonist from A Clockwork Orange, as the poster’s face:
Alex’s menacing gaze followed me wherever I went - even up to the 5th floor cafeteria at work.
Despite all these “coincidences” there seems to be no connection between the book and the Dutch language or the Netherlands. Or rather, there is no apparent connection that the Internet has revealed yet.
P.S. The gigantic poster was taken down a few days ago and replaced with another one announcing the temporary move of the Van Gogh museum’s exhibits to Hermitage Amsterdam. Plenty of Dutch connections there!
