Am continuing with The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, which is fascinating, as much of a deep dive into self’s girlhood (she visited Hong Kong on Family trips, maybe five or six times in her childhood) as anything else.
Sentence of the Day:
Here are some suggestions from Cee:
Possible topics brown, geometric shapes, sidewalk, brick, pavers, outdoor mall, rainy, eating, food, candid, trees, tables, chairs, windows, red, green, etc. What else can you come up with?
Have fun this week.
Self’s picture was taken from the Jubilee Bridge, the Southbank end (she hopes that’s the correct name for the bridge. If Old Map Man is reading, can he correct her if she’s wrong?)
Self loves Southbank, there is such a vibe.
Of course, that’s the London Eye. Self was thinking: trees, geometric shapes, pedestrians, pavers!
Posting for Thursday Doors, hosted by No Facilities.
Welcome to Thursday Doors! This is a weekly challenge for people who love doors and architecture to come together to admire and share their favorite door photos, drawings, or other images or stories from around the world. If you’d like to join us, simply create your own Thursday Doors post each (or any) week and then share a link to your post in the comments below, anytime between 12:01 am Thursday morning and Saturday noon (North American eastern time). If you like, you can add our badge to your post.
Doors to The Penn Club, on London’s Bedford Place, which sadly closed its doors forever in 2021. It was self’s little nest, only a stone’s throw from the British Museum.
Doors to the Corners of the Mouth, organic grocery in Mendocino Village. They sell all sorts of goodies from Boont Berry Farm: cheese, salads, carrot cake.
Last: HOME SWEET HOME! Picture of self’s front door.
“Homesickness starts with food,” said Che Guevara, pining perhaps for the vast roasts of his native Argentina while they, men alone in the night in Sierra Maestra, spoke of war. For me, too, homesickness for Galicia had started with food even before I had been there. The fact is that my grandmother, in the big house at Aracata, where I got to know my first ghosts, had the delightful role of baker and she carried on even when she was already old and nearly blind, until the river flooded, ruined the oven and no one in the house felt like rebuilding it. But my grandmother’s vocation was so strong that when she could no longer make bread, she made hams. Delicious hams, though we children did not like them — children never like the novelties of adults — even though the flavor of that first taste has remained recorded forever on the memory of my palate. I never found it again in any of the many and various hams I ate later in any of my good or bad years until, by chance, I tasted — 40 years later, in Barcelona — an innocent slice of shoulder of pork.
— from the essay Watching the Rain in Galicia, included in Travelers’ Tales Guides: Spain, edited by Lucy McCauley
Self is in a nostalgic mood this rainy, gloomy Sunday in northern California.
Posting for Travel with Intent’s One-Word Sunday. The theme is SKYLINE.
Here’s Southbank by the Thames. Took these pictures leaving Shakespeare’s Globe after a play. The bridge is the old Blackfriars.
Self’s hometown Fourth of July Parade was in-person this year, for the first time in three years. Though crowds were sparse, it really felt like a moment.
Posting for Brashear’s Mid-Week Monochrome Challenge.
Here she is last night, at the post-rehearsal reception, in one of San Francisco’s premiere Tiki Bars, Pagan Idol on Bush.
It seems only yesterday when she wrote me a note: “Tita, I’m accepting Stanford because of you.”
Posting for Debbie Smyth’s Six-Word Saturday Challenge.
Thank you to Ragtag Daily Prompt Thursday for the Prompt: COLUMNS.
Self has been on a kind of nostalgia trip since beginning the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. Today, she went back to her old stomping grounds on the Stanford campus and took pictures of anything that could pass for a column. She went to Hoover Tower and saw an exhibit on the Cold War. She photographed the covered walkway in the School of Education. She photographed a skateboard rack. She photographed the Clock Tower, a favorite meeting place for self and her friends.
Self’s favorite public square is the Great Courtyard of the British Museum. OK, technically it’s not a square (lol), It’s a CIRCLE.
The last time she was in London (May this year: She saw the Stonehenge exhibit and the one on feminine power), she took an architectural tour of the Museum (free). It was fascinating (though too short). The guide led us outside, told us about the architect, then led us to the great courtyard, and said it was the largest covered public square in the world. Self had no time to look up this one particular fact. But she loves the Great Courtyard, regardless.
She used to hang out here almost every day, when she stayed at The Penn Club on Bedford Place (The Club has since closed — WAAAH!). She’d pick a quiet corner and work — wi-fi was, and is, free. The food concession stands sold affordable soup, salad, and pastries. Right across the hall was the Rosetta Stone. What’s not to love?
Last spring it was packed like a market square. Self was a little thrown by the number of people, most of them unmasked. But she came home without catching covid, go figure.
Posting for Marsha Ingrao and Cee Neuner’s Photographing Public Art Challenge (PPAC).
You can’t really see the smiles in this picture, but you can feel them. Yesterday, in Redwood City, corner of Jefferson and Middlefield, during the Fourth of July Parade.
It was the first parade since 2019. There was heavy police presence, but the atmosphere was very relaxed.
Posting this for Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge (CFFC): Brings a Smile to Your Face.
Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 