pillar

Mack’s

This modern luxury high-rise apartment block stands next door to an apartment building where I lived as a boy, on the site of a former one-storey auto-body repair shop known as Mack’s because the Black man who owned and operated it was called Mack. Unknown to us at the time, he was Carl C McNair, father of “Ronald Erwin McNair (October 21, 1950 – January 28, 1986)… an American NASA astronaut and physicist [who] died at the age of 35 during the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger.”

One day we took the train from Cardiff up to Newport where we caught a bus to Caerleon, home to several ancient Roman ruins and one of the primary claimants to be the site of Camelot. We first visited the Roman baths, which were fascinating, though I came away with few useful photographs, then made our way to a small museum, outside of which we visited the “Roman-inspired” garden where these pictures were taken.

Ghent

After coming out the right side of the train station and passing the bicycle parking, we walked past a hotel guarded by a black cat and through the Citadelpark.

Brussels Midi

We walked down Stalingrad, past all the Arab coffee houses, to the crowded platform at the Brussels Midi-Zuid train station. “In your own time,” might be the motto of the Belgian train service as only one train we took out of about eight trips actually left on time. OTOH, you can really travel all over the country relatively easily by train, something that can not be said of the US.

Pillar, Shadow, Moto

These pillars link the Palais de Tokyo to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. I was struck by the strong light behind them, the wide shadows they were casting and how the shadows linked to the row of all black motorcycles but I couldn’t quite find the angle I wanted.