blue balance barcelona

These photos turned out this way by accident: we’d fiddled with the white balance setting the day before, and forgot to change it for a while in the bright sunlight. Despite this, I quite like the blue-tinted appearance it gives to the park!

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German Children Try to Elope to Africa

There’s certainly more than enough bad news in the world these days, and my supremely pessimistic grandfather finds it all and makes sure I know about it, but there was one indisputably charming news story yesterday, which came from Germany.
Anna-Bell and Mika decided to go to Africa to get married, tired of wintry Germany and [...]

Castley Bits, part 3

This summer I went to one place completely different from the cookie-cutter British cities, the Medieval Toledo, only half an hour from Madrid on the High-Speed Train. Toledo sits atop an excrutiating hill, beige and roasting in the intense heat, a walled city that was once home to the three religions that coexisted in [...]

Castley Bits, part 2

Speaking of anachronistic buildings next to each other in Europe, obviously a far greater occurrence than in North America.
The tower of London and Londn City Hall facing one another across the Thames are an example of positive contrast. The modernism of the City Hall does not take away from the grisly dignity of the [...]

Castley Bits, part 1

A friend I once travelled with squealed with delight at the prospect of the Tower of London seen from across the river, and came out with the immortal splutter of “Ooooh….Castley Bits,” which became some of a slogan for the entire trip. The trip itself was a typical enough Canadians-backpacking-in-Europe type of adventure, [...]

City, city…

They can print statistics and count the population in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city no longer exists except as a pain in the memory….
Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
This is [...]