“In masks outrageous and austere
Elinor Wylie
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile”
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Beautiful Masks
Category: photography
My costly hobby. Find all my photos Flickr.
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Blue
Been a bit depressed lately. Mostly work related, I’m fed up, not enjoying work anymore and I don’t know how to fix it. Work is 8 to 9 hours a day; a third of my week (not counting the weekend) and if it’s not fun for a long time that starts to affect my whole attitude.
I can’t work at a job I’m not emotionally involved with. I’ve worked with people who can come to work in the morning, work for 9 hours with no expenditure of emotion at all and go home as if nothing has happened. It’s amazing to me. I get angry, happy, upset, irritated, fascinated, worried and intrigued at work. That’s not to say that I don’t leave work at work (at least most of the time.) I try to keep a healthy separation between professional and personal life. I’m friends with people at work; some of them I am friends with outside work others not so much, but work is work and then there is everything else.
Problem is if work is only filled with the bad emotions; anger, disbelief, irritation and upset then it starts erode the emotional attachment to the job. And once the emotional attachment is gone it’s time to find a new job…
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So long Mosque Street
So long Mosque Street. I will miss the beauty of this apartment. The wonderful shophouse windows and the high ceilings with the beams exposed. I will miss the muted sounds of the call to prayer from the mosque down the street. And I will miss being in the middle of it all… the Chinese New Year celebrations, the Indian festivals, the endless tourist hordes and the many places to just be.
I will not miss the noise; the trash truck that comes every night sometime between 11PM and 2AM and wakes everyone up for 10 minutes. The old Chinese guy who can’t pick his flip-flops off the ground as he walk… slowly… down the middle of the street. At 3AM. Every night! I won’t miss him waking me up every night.
We’ve been in the new place now for just over a week. It’s nice. Far from the crowded streets of the downtown area and surrounded by green. Much cooler (relatively; it’s still Singapore, one degree from the equator—at sea level—it’s just hot, nothing to do about it, c’est la vie.) Still a lot of boxes and a few minor things left to finish. I really miss the windows from Mosque Street they added a level of character to the place that can’t be duplicated. (They were replicas of the original window shutters that were on the building when it was built as the first public housing in Singapore in the 1920’s!)
It’s nice to have a place that is really ours. Nice to know that when we bring our firstborn home from the hospital for the first time it will be to our house, not to a rented house but to our house.
Now if only I could get the boxes to empty themselves.
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Beach Booty
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Siena, Italy, November 2007
The hilltop city of Siena [wikipedia.org] is a few hours by train from Florence. I suspect the bus trip would have been better but we had more days than we could use on our rail pass so we took the train. From the train station we walked the 2 kilometers or so to the top of the hill and into the center of the medieval and renaissance town.
The center of Siena, Il Campo [wikipedia.org] sight of the famous Palio di Siena [wikipedia.org] a twice yearly crazy horse race between representatives of the various wards of the city for bragging rights. By the time we got to Il Campo it was time for lunch so we pulled out our friendly Lonely Planet Italy guide [lonelyplanet.com] and looked for a good place to eat.
The first place we tried was only open for dinner in the off season. The second place was closed completely for the off season. The third was an empty shop. The fourth we never found. So after an hour of back and forth around the city center and it’s steep hills and steps we decided to just go back to Il Campo and eat at one of the many places there. The food was not bad but it was a bit frustrating after looking forward to the highly recommended menus of the places in the guide
An unfortunate side effect of our hour looking for food was that we could not enter one of the major sites I wanted to see in Siena; the Palazzo Pubblico [wikipedia.org] or town hall and it’s museum and the Torre del Mangia [wikipedia.org] the 102 meter high bell tower dominating the Campo. Problem was these sights close an hour before sunset in the off season, sunset was around 4:30 when we were there and it’s was just after 3:30 when we got there. The only thing we could do was go the the Siena Cathedral [wikipedia.org].
The cathedral is one of the most beautiful in Italy. The exterior is similar to the cathedrals in both Florence [confusion.cc] and Pisa [confusion.cc]. The inside is much more amazing; whereas the inside of the cathedral in Florence is, aside from the painted dome, sparse, Siena’s Duomo is beautiful. Filled with mosaic floors and fresco-ed alters.
By the time we finished touring around the cathedral it was dark outside and we did not do much more in Siena. A cup of coffee in a small cafe and one more stop at il Campo before taking a bus back to the train station and heading back to Florence for the night. I hope we can go back and visit the sights we missed some day, Siena was one of the most beautiful places we visited in Italy.
You can see the a few more photos in the Siena, Italy, November 2007 photoset on Flickr [flickr.com].