Fotoeins Fotografie

location bifurcation, place vs. home

Posts from the ‘Photography’ category

International Terminal, Vancouver International Airport, YVR airport, YVR, Vancouver, BC, Canada, fotoeins.com

YVR Xmas (2020): prolonged pandemic pause

Above/featured: “Auténtica Cuba, auténtica fun”.

I’ve remained within metro Vancouver during the CoVid19 pandemic, but I’m curious about how the city’s airport appears in this unusual holiday season.

With no-travel recommendations and other travel restrictions, all international airports are operating at a small fraction of the usual traffic. At YVR Vancouver international airport, about 100-thousand passengers (pax) pass through the airport every day around Christmas. But numbers are way down; there are few daily international flights among the scatter of domestic departures throughout the B.C. province and other parts of Canada.

With these photographs, I present a view of both domestic and international terminals at the airport on Tuesday afternoon, 3 days before Christmas. Walking the empty and quiet concourse is surreal; I wonder if there are more airport staff than travellers at any given moment. (Completing my time at the airport, I stayed to the ground by hopping on rapid transit, shopped for some food, and returned to the family house: how extraordinarily mundane.)

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Fagus-Werk, Fagus Factory Building, Fagus, Walter Gropius, Karl Benscheidt, Alfeld, Lower Saxony, Niedersachsen, Germany, UNESCO, World Heritage, Bauhaus, fotoeins.com

A-3 in D-E

Above/featured: “Welterbe” (World heritage): GreCon/Fagus, Alfeld – 28 Sep 2017.

For LAPC’s first alphabet challenge, I present three German locations whose names begin with ‘A’; all three are in the list of the nation’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS).

•   Aachen, in North Rhine Westphalia (Nordrhein-Westfalen, NW),
•   Alfeld, in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen, NI), and
•   Augsburg, in Bavaria (Bayern, BY).

(I also created an A-3 post for Aotearoa/New Zealand.)

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Seattle Ballard: Sunday Farmers Market

In Seattle, a friend in Ballard recommends a visit to their neighbourhood’s weekly farmers’ market. Despite the forecast for intermittent morning showers, I’m lured by any stroll through a market for bright harvest colours and freshly prepared food.

A slow meander through the stalls, letting curiosity be the guide. Fresh apples and pears here; ripe plump tomatoes there. From an assortment of red and yellow peppers; to an array of yellow and green gourds. Quickly, the appetite is on high alert. Quesadillas prepared fresh from the grill. Hot from the fryer, little donuts sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. Happy dogs walking their humans; couples strolling with children; others sitting on the curb for a chat, nosh, and sip.

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Seattle Lake View: Bruce & Brandon Lee

Honouring the surname

In the mid- to late-1970s, our parents took us to single-screen movie theatres with names like Olympia, Golden Harvest, and Shaw for cinema night to watch movies made in Hong Kong. There were dramas; some high on the melodrama and low on character. Some were historic-period pieces, and there were kung-fu movies for which Dad passed his love to me.

There’s nothing quite like seeing a kung-fu action sequence on a big screen. I was mesmerized the first time I laid eyes on a memorable fight scene set in Rome’s Colosseum, that epic scene observed by little stone dragons between “Little Dragon” himself, Bruce Lee, and Chuck Norris’ character in the 1972 film “The Way of the Dragon“. As a kid, I was proud to have had the same surname as this Bruce fellow, and memories of seeing his on-screen characters prevailing in fights have stuck over time (e.g., “Boards don’t hit back.”)

Tragically, Bruce and his son, Brandon, died too young. I’m certain when I was a teen that I asked where Bruce Lee was buried; my parents didn’t know and in pre-internet days, it was more of a challenge to find those answers. But the mystery has long been solved: Bruce Lee and his son, Brandon, lay side by side in Lake View Cemetery in Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Despite multiple visits to the city in years past, this particular return trip to Seattle has been decades in the making for a chance to honour a part of my childhood and a part of my heritage. When I find the Lees, my arrival means another answer has been quietly realized. On a crisp bright autumn morning under blue skies, I feel my father’s spirit with me; he never had the chance to come to this cemetery. My lips move without voice, a prayer I utter into the ether, pushing for hope to reach him. Because I know now that this, is also for my Dad.

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