The first day of travel helps set the tone for the entire enchilada. I got lounge access at YVR airport, and a Premium Economy seat on the non-stop transatlantic hop with Condor to FRA. The company debut its fleet of A339neo planes last year, and while its Economy service was fine, Iām optimistic the seating class with increased seat pitch will provide enough comfort for actual sleep.
How about some planespotting from the Plaza Premium Lounge?
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 8 May 2024. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-skr.
A few things have happened since I last saw and spoke with you.
As the calendar transitioned from 2023 to 2024, I understood I would relive in part the trauma of living through and āsurvivingā my parentsā deaths. I knew the replay in mind, body, and spirit was entirely, critically, and consciously inevitable: one, two.
After some dawdling on my part (lasting months), my sister and I finally put up for sale the family house in Chinatown/East Vancouver. We listed the house in early-January with open-house viewing mid-month. According to our realtor, about a dozen groups of people passed through for a look. We received an offer, and after minor negotiations, we accepted in February the offer on par with assessment.
Over two separate busy sessions, we had the house emptied (āruthlesslyā) of all its items, leaving behind only appliances, light-fixtures, and very old drapes. On April 3rd, I handed all of the house-keys to the buyerās realtor, ending in that simple gesture almost 50 years of our familyās presence within a simple but very functional 2-storey house. By the end of April 4th (ādouble 4, double deathā), BC Hydro had cut all power to the house.
āGoodbye.ā East Vancouver, 2 Apr 2024 (iP15).
The emotional impact wasnāt as difficult as I had imagined, despite my inclination to self-destruction. But typing this now in a basement apartment Iāve rented for a month in New Westminster, it feels a lot like Iām finally closing the doors to many things to the rapidly fading past. Am I going to look back? Perhaps. It seems unkind not to, but there is a growing sense thereās more āout there,ā if I decide Iām brave enough to move forward, one foot in front of the other. But I donāt intend on going back.
(And yet, thatās what I said when I left for Toronto in 1994, never imagining my return in 2013. Funny how my eventual refusal to abandon the parents worked out after all ā¦)
It is an enormous mixture of satisfaction and the bittersweet: a little sad itās gone and out of our hands, but Iām also eager now to get out of this place.
I made the image above with an iPhone15 on 16 April 2024. Composed entirely within Jetpack for iOS, this post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-sjg.
Fujifilm film-simulation recipes for X-Trans II detectors, applied to the X70:
2 Jun 2023: Fujichrome Slide.
9 Jun 2023: Kodak Platinum 200.
16 Jun 2023: Ektachrome 100SW.
23 Jun 2023: Kodacolor. 30 Jun 2023: Kodachrome 64.
I made the image above on 25 Jun 2021 with a Fujifilm X70 fixed-lens prime and these settings: 1/1000-sec, f/10, ISO1000, and 18.5mm focal length (28mm full-frame equivalent). This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-p90.
Above/featured: U2 train departing Berlin’s Zoologischer Garten station – 28 November 2021.
I look back at an eventful 2021 year with 21 images with personal questions about how impending- and actual-loss affect how life proceeds beyond death, and how feelings of real belonging are different from feelings of a proper home.
Fotoeins Fotografie 