I would like to wish everybody a very merry Christmas.
Or, if you don’t want to be merry for whatever reason, I wish you a quiet and peaceful Christmas.
And if you don’t want any Christmas at all, have a good time off work, filled with whatever activity you want.
And if you have to work at Christmas, I wish you a lot of energy to get you through the day and not too many idiots to deal with.
I’ve taken a few shots with my new Motorola One Zoom of the festive Manchester, so I thought I’d make a post of them. The phone shoots quite decently in the dark, which is something I still haven’t learnt to do.
Some pics of the Christmas markets, which have now wrapped up.
This last one is from inside the Printworks. So good of Iorek Byrnison to grace us with a visit! I bet that scarf was a gift from Lyra. 😀 😀 😀
Winter has come indeed and a cold one it is.
A smartphone pic taken while waiting for my tram in the morning.
Despair
/de· dɪˈspɛː/
noun
the complete loss or absence of hope
Source: Google
Alternatively, a Friday on which results of vote are announced.
Be like me. Stay indoors instead.
This is a continuation of my previous post Home, as they share the same theme.
Keep yourselves warm!
I have not quite finished with York yet!
Remember me mentioning the narrow streets? Well, they reminded me of Diagon Alley from Harry Potter. Or what I imagined it to be.
Just have a look for yourselves:
Like, literally…
See what I mean?
Last autumnal pictures from this year. Taken with my new phone.
It’s not been a bad autumn for photography for me despite the frequent rain. Now let the Christmas season begin!
It is the undoubtedly magnificent cathedral of York–and here I give you the pics.
Dean’s Park. It was wort it coming here in autumn, for sure.
Inside shots:
In addition to the normal entry fee (£11.50, valid for 12 months), you can also purchase a trip to the tower for an extra fiver. This means climbing up 275 steps. When I was offered this, my immediate thought was, I probably won’t regret it, so I said yes.
I didn’t regret it.
Although when the woman selling the tickets told me about 275 steps, it never occurred to me it would be this:
I’ve never climbed that high up a spiral staircase, so yay for another new experience!
Trips up the tower are done in groups at regular intervals, so I just joined the next available one.
Reward in the form of panoramatic view of York.
You’ve probably heard of York, beautiful walled city with rich history. I finally made a trip there and took over 200 photographs. It was only the day after that I discovered I had the wrong setting on my camera. Some time before I had set ISO to 6400 (I’m not sure why) and forgot to set it back, which is why so many pictures were taken with a narrow aperture and don’t look as good as they should. Live and learn I guess.
But here are some that are okay enough to be posted:
I didn’t get a chance to walk along the walls. I wanted to see the cathedral and city centre first and by the time I got back, it was dark already. The clocks have gone back the previous weekend, what can I say. But at least I got some autumn leaves, which I couldn’t have got had I gone there in the summer.
One of the best known landmarks here is York Minster. I will do a separate post for it but here’s two shots for now.
The narrow streets are really something else.
The Cat Gallery, a shop for all cat lovers. Did I buy something for myself there? You bet I did!
This month marks 30 years since the end of Communist rule in Europe. Berlin Wall, that unmistakable symbol of the East/West divide, fell on the 9th November 1989. While scrolling on Twitter on the day of the anniversary, I came across this article by Ken Sweeney, where he calls Trabant cars “chariots of freedom”. What has a car got to do with the collapse of autocratic regime?
Well this. Trabants were manufactured in East Germany; I remember there were plenty of them in former Czechoslovakia. They were quite awful, a subject of ridicule and to this day bring back memories of those times. But, as Ken notes, they were also the vehicles that transported people from East Germany through the newly open border to the West. Thus, chariots of freedom.
Surprisingly, I happen to have some pics of them too.
This is from 2013 when I was visiting my family back home. Taken on a motorway, obviously, near or just out of Bratislava. Brother and me went on a short trip when we spotted it in front of us. Of course I had to take a pic. Looks like someone is a fan!
I never take pictures of cars, I never learnt to drive and I’m not interested in them but I never miss an opportunity for a good random or weird shot. Even long before I conceived the idea of Random and Weird Phone Shots.
There is also a model of Trabant displayed in Imperial War Museum in Salford Quays.
I just love how something so awful can decades later be thought of in any positive terms at all. I like a good redemption story.
They say a car needs to get you from A to B. For East Germans, that A and B were more than just places on a map.
