Which Way Photo Challenge, June 9

From challenge host San:

The Which Way photo challenge is all about capturing the roads, walks, trails, rails, steps, signs, etc. we move from one place to another on. You can walk on them, climb them, drive them, ride on them, as long as the specific way is visible. Any angle of a bridge is acceptable as are any signs. There’s no topic to this challenge. All you need have is the “way” visible and the main focus of your photo. To enter, simply add a link in your post to this post and leave a comment down below.

My way: Sculpture Garden, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

Mendocino Headlands, Dec. 26, 2022

Posting for Water Water Everywhere challenge.

Good Morning from the Mendocino Hotel

Here for the Mendocino Film Festival. Saw a documentary yesterday: Salvatore, Shoemaker of Dreams. Seeing another documentary this morning: Patrick and the Whale.

This afternoon, seeing a Nicole Holofcener movie (She is this year’s Rogue Wave honoree) and The Forger (German film).

Tonight: A Bunch of Amateurs, a British documentary about a small amateur filmmaking club struggling to survive.

Posting for Six Word Saturday.

Which Way Photo Challenge, June 2

Another day, another photo challenge. Today it’s the Which Way Photo Challenge. From the host:

• The Which Way photo challenge is all about capturing the roads, walks, trails, rails, steps, signs, etc. we move from one place to another on. You can walk on them, climb them, drive them, ride on them, as long as the specific way is visible.

My way is on the Stanford University campus. Looking straight ahead from the steps of the Cantor Art Center. That’s the Bing Concert Hall in the distance.

Last on the Card – May 2023

I love this challenge, hosted by bushboys world:

• Everyone who contributes their good and not so good photos has fun I hope. I enjoy seeing your photos. Thanks to those being brave enough to show everyone your last photo or photos from your phone and camera.

Both pictures were taken within minutes of each other, on the last day of May, just past noon.

I’d been spending day after day on the couch, writing. For a break, I’d grab whatever came to hand (yes, I am that lazy). First, Evan Winter’s The Rage of Dragons, the next book on my reading list (after Matthieu Aikins’ powerful The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, an account of the year he spent living like an Afghan refugee).

The magazine is the latest issue of Sunset, which I have been subscribing to ever since I became a Californian. I took a picture of the Food page, because it featured a Filipino restaurant in Seattle, “one of the best Filipino restaurants in the country,” Musang.

Sentence of the Day: Matthieu Aikins

The players were doing a relay race now, but Ezat’s gaze drifted into the distance, as if seeing his own road ahead — his twelve attempts, the container of diapers in which he’d made it onto the ferry, the forty-eight hours he’d spend trapped inside, the church in Italy where he would take refuge from the police, the train ride without a ticket to France, the freezing alleys of Paris, the Champ de Mars where he would stand trembling in ecstasy, Hamburg where he would be granted asylum, where after two years he’d learn enough German to start university, his past as inscrutable to his classmates as his future would be to his family in Iran, living alone in body and in mind, the cold of the River Elbe in winter seeping into his bones.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 266

The Degradation of the Camps

You have to hand it to Aikins. At any point, he could have said, “I give up! It’s all too much! I want my life back!” After all, he’s a citizen of a rich Western country, he has a Pulitzer for chrissake. But in dogged pursuit of his goal — to prove whether it is indeed possible for an ordinary Afghan to escape from Afghanistan to the west — he stays in the filthy refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos (He’s lucky he undertook this journey in 2016, before covid. The risk of infection in the crowding and unsanitary conditions of a refugee camp would probably have been 90%)

So, um, the bathroom situation. Here goes:

I stood outside the toilet blocks, trembling, and lit another smoke. The line was longer now, and wound its way through dry patches in the sewage. I counted seven men’s stalls in the lower block, and another twelve uphill; a third block was out of order — the camp’s water often stopped running entirely. Nineteen toilets for several thousand men, along with some porta potties. The women had their own toilets but they were unsafe after dark, as were the fields outside the fence.

I walked back uphill, my cough joining the chorus around me. My throat was raw; it felt like I was catching something. Some kind of respiratory ailment was going around — maybe influenza. The children, especially, had swollen eyes and mouths. There’d been outbreaks of scabies and varicella in Moria; our bodies were covered in insect bites and rashes.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 203

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Colorful Monochromes

Cee:

• This week our topic is Colorful Monochromes. Your photos needs to be at least 90% one color hue. Be creative and have fun with this challenge.

For this post, I’m focusing on GREEN monochromes. The photos below were taken in a Protected Area of the Philippines: the Mount Banahaw and Mount Cristobal Protected Landscape, which I visited last month. There’s a narrow path, along which visitors must walk to get to a waterfall. Along the way, you do see mostly green. Maybe less than 90% in some photos, but what the hey!

Night, Annaghmakerrig

Took this picture of Annagmakerrig Lake on my last night at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, last November.

Posting for Jez’s Water, Water Everywhere Challenge # 176.

Self-Deport: Lesbos, 2016

The intrepid author and his friend Omar have managed to survive being on an overcrowded rubber dinghy and being rammed (repeatedly) by the (Turkish?) coast guard. Because of the repeated ramming, the dinghy gets pushed into Greek territorial waters (!), and the Turkish turn away. Whew! (The author: “It sometimes seemed like they were trying to sink the dinghy.” You think???)

They’re now on the Greek island of Lesbos, the one place they told their smuggler they did not want to end up in. (The author, still phlegmatic: “It had been apparent for some time that Hajji had lied.”)

At the overwhelmed registration center, the Greek authorities handed out pieces of paper ordering the migrants to self-deport, and then let them board the ferry to Athens, where they headed north through the Balkans, into Europe.

In August, a hundred thousand people landed in the Greek islands, most of them on Lesbos. A majority were Syrian, and there were unusual numbers of women and children among them, as it became apparent that you could travel safely once you reached solid ground.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, pp. 167-168