Bill Murray's Blog, page 136

Next Stop Saigon

We’re off soon for a bit of holiday travel – our fifth visit to Vietnam and third to India, with a stop in Bangkok in between. It’s been five years to the month since our last visit to Vietnam and we’re chomping at the bit to get out into the Mekong delta again. We’ll be spending time in Saigon, the floating market towns of Cai Be and Can Tho and the waterways in between.

You can’t beat Vietnam for photo opportunities. These photos are all from the Mekong delta, from previous visits.

Our destination in India is the former kingdom of Sikkim, nestled between Nepal and Bhutan, and sharing a northern border with Tibet and the high Himalayas. It’ll be our first time there.

We’ll write about it all here.

There are hundreds more photos in the Vietnam Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Friday Photo Quiz #189

This week’s quiz is tough. There are precious few national icons in this relatively young country, so the clues can only give a general sense of the place. First we see that this country has a lovely coast, in the middle that it boasts some remarkable religious architecture, and finally, we get a generic look at housing in the capital city. Can you guess the country? The capital?

Click through for the answer. And a good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.

And the answer is …………………….. it’s the former Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro, capital city Podgorica. See more photos from Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia in the Former Yugoslavia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.

Orienting Yourself to These Kyiv Protests

Sometimes if you’re not familiar with a place, a little context helps. This photo, above, shows protesters given shelter and sleeping at St. Michael’s Cathedral, just up the hill from #Euromaidan. It’s from this YouTube video. Here is almost the same view from our trip there last March, without protesters.

In the photo below from a story in the Kyiv Post (photo credited to AFP), you can see where St. Michael’s is, relative to EuroMaidan, just up the hill around back.

Below is the church itself, with the short road to Euromaidan extending off to the top right. The dark space extending into the photo from the center left is the Dnieper River, with the left bank in the distance. There were reports last night (12 November, 2013) that the authorities blocked bridges across the river, and thus access, to people coming to reinforce protesters in the Euromaidan.

Finally, a view to Euromaidan from essentially the same vantage point, with the camera turned just a little to the right and zoomed in some, so that St. Michael’s is just out of the frame to the left. Euromaidan is dead center. You recognize the Ukraine Hotel’s big blue sign on the left and the independence monument to the right of the hotel.

Khreshchatyk, the main street in Kyiv, stretches off from near the monument to the right. It’s lined with shops and, according to Wikipedia, “Along the street are located buildings of the Kiev City Administration which contains both the city’s council and the state administration, the Main Post Office, the Ministry of Agrarian Policy, the State Committee of Television and Radio Broadcasting, the Central Department Store (TsUM), the Besarabka Market, the Ukrainian House, and others.”

Just a little perspective. Photos link to the original versions.

Wednesday HDRs from Dublin and Howth, Ireland

Here are a few processed photos from two weeks ago in Ireland. All these and a few more on in the Ireland Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, where a few more are added every day. Click any of ‘em to make ‘em bigger.

This is the Christ Church, downtown. It looks better bigger.

Food counter, Dublin.

Fishmonger at Howth, out on the coast.

The Guinness factory, Dublin.

Sign in a pub, Dublin.

The lighthouse at Howth, on canvas.

Downtown Dublin at night.

Sochi Olympics Watch #20

Sometime before the Sochi Olympics opening ceremonies in 58 days, try to set a little time aside for this 17 minute excerpt (as viewed on RFE/RL by permission) from Putin’s Games, a film by Director Alexander Gentelev. From the fim’s website:

“The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia will be the first ever to be held in a subtropical resort. The most expensive games ever break all records when it comes to corruption and megalomania. Putin’s administration has everyone at its beck and call, from oligarchs down to the ordinary people who have to pay the Olympic bill. Both the powerful and the weak speak out in this investigative documentary, which unveils the hidden story behind Putin’s games. Government critic Garry Kasparov says that Putin’s Olympic propaganda is really all about speeding up the privatization of land in Sochi. Many inhabitants have had to make way for hotels, ski jumps and a large harbor, which were subsequently swept away by storms and landslides – the Olympic village was built on a swamp in the hottest region of Russia. To a large extent, the story of these environmentally unfriendly Olympic Games is one of threats and enormous misappropriations of money. The 45-kilometer (28-mile) road to the Olympic Village was so expensive that it might as well have been paved with gold or black caviar. Director Alexander Gentelev got to speak to many key figures, from the mayor of Sochi and corrupt contractors, senators and lobbyists to the president of the Russian National Olympic Committee.”

Meanwhile Foreign Policy magazine has photos and excerpts from what looks like a huge coffee table book, The Sochi Project, An Atlas of War and Tourism in the Caucasus .

Both show all the fun, clean, aw shucks, doggone it, GOOD FEELING that’s building in southern Russia around these Olympics. Heck, you can almost feel it from here.

Pano in Progress

Still editing this, but I’m liking the initial results of stitching four photos together to arrive at this panorama of the Liffey River at sunset in Dublin, one day last week. It’ll make it to the Ireland gallery on EarthPhotos.com when it’s all clean and pretty. The full-sized version is a little over a meter long:

More from #Euromaidan

While the U.S. press is all-Mandela-all-the-time, it’s worth remembering there is other news. Today’s protest in Kyiv appears to be the real thing. Here is remarkable video from #Euromaidan (

Kyiv: 2004 Redux?

Having visited Kyiv eight months ago, enjoyed photographing some of the Orthodox churches and walked through Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, (#EuroMaidan) the central square that was home to the 2004 Orange Revolution, I’m drawn to coverage of the ongoing demonstrations. An acquaintance in Kyiv tells me he does not think this will amount to a new revolution, that most “people who are standing now on the streets are don’t know why they are there,” and that the government is corrupt but not stupid. He thinks, as Julia Ioffe writes in another context, that it’s just not possible to ignore the looming Russian presence in the Ukrainian economy. He also sends along the best photo coverage of the protests I’ve seen.

(Kiev is the Russian spelling. Ukraine adopted the Ukrainian spelling, Kyiv, at independence.)

First Report from Last Week’s Dublin Visit

… about as you’d imagine.

Click it to make it big. More to come.

Five Nights in Dublin

I regret the lack of Wednesday HDRs these last several weeks. Blame it on a lack of new material. But there’s good news: We’re off for a week in Dublin, and I’ll try to bring back fun new photos to share. It’s an urban vacation, five nights, all in town. We’ll see what we come back with, but any lack of good stuff won’t be for a lack of shooting. It’s been well over ten years since our last visit to Ireland, so we’re way overdue.