Wasabi in Prague

Astronomical Clock (Old Town Square)

Part of the rainbow (Old Town Square)

King Wasabi along Royal Path to Charles Bridge

Befriending celebrities – Mozart and Chaplin

Never stiff as wood

siesta

Sweet meditation on Charles Bridge

Wasabi as Cinderella

Virtuoso audience?

Competitive Wasabi:

Which is bigger – my head or the mushrooms?

Jump! I want to have pork tonight.

Fluffy evening sky

Wasabi was a birthday present. It’s a handmade stuff toy from a friend, sent to me last year.

City of glass

Glass is cool – to the touch and the eye in Berlin.

Glass was the first thing that seized my eyes and kept delighting me, kept me suspended in crisp, delicate rapture, all the way from HauptBahnof, Reichstag and the rebuilt Potsdamerplatz. If I could, may I plaster myself against the cold hard plains and roll all over them? My thirst for glass is unquenchable, incurable.

But I’m picky. A harbour fenced by plain, glossy phalluses is downright a visual pollution, an insult to glass, a true lady of all construction materials. Even Batman can’t redeem the dull, useless phalluses here, not in my eye.

HauptBahnof – arrival

Two skies in Berlin

Glass tunnel

Potsdamerplatz

Smooth cyber-moder cluster – Sony Centre

Lego! My favourite toy

Holocaust Mahnmal – Treacherous paths, tragic past

Holocaust Mahnmal (Holocaust Memorial) by Peter Eisenman

Mirrors are relentless. But men and women have perfected the art of pretence – with clothes, make-up, plastic or ruefully accept imperfection as an indespensible element in life. I don’t like looking into the mirror because helplessness is heavy. Anyways, most of the flaws I see cannot be corrected, not by an unadventrous slob.

Likewise, the past is relentless, more so than the reflections in a mirror because there’s no way one can turn away from it. Europeans must find it strange that I should be so touched by war museums and monuments, that a girl from a city unscathed by the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes should heave out endless sighs in Warsaw Old Town Sqaure and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. But it takes immense courage to face up to one’s past, to tidy up and sort out one’s past, no matter how tragic, how shameful it is. I was moved by the courage demonstrated by the people in Warsaw and Berlin. It must be exhilirating to live in a country that doesn’t flinch away from its past, I often wonder.

The Holocaust Memorial is next to Brandenburg Gate, right behind the DZ Bank. It’s a vast field filled up by more than 2700 black, unadorned rectangular blocks of different height. Visitors can enter the monument from all direction and roam in it along the many paths between the blocks. The whole experience of wandering in a maze built on uneven ground and dwarfed by dark, solemn blocks drew me closer to the bleak, senseless past. I wonder if it’s a metaphor – it’s never simple and easy for a country, an entire race, to meditate, reflect upon and finally emerge from the past.

I really admire the design because it’s an open monument, that people can walk through it for sightseeing or on their way home, to work or shopping give the sense that this episode in history, shameful it may be, shall be remembered and form part of one’s life. After all, memorial is about keeping alive the memories. Moreover, it looks solemn without giving a daunting, distant air – children played hide-and-seek there while I was in it. This should prepare the innocent little ones for the tragedy they have to learn as they grow older and are ready.

Former leaders of Khmer Rouge are now being hunted down for trials. I hope God will not fling down a farce as he did with the trial of Milosevic. How self-centred – he was the only one who had the last laugh. But perhaps he has been wearing a quirk, arms crossed, for the last sixty five years, over some countries in the Pacific, countries that whitewashed massacres, that altered history books, that painted over their gruesome, barbaric pasts?

Snapshots of intriguing walls

Spheres of influence on Pariser platz and the surrounding

French Embassy on Pariser Platz

By Christian de Portzamparc. I dub it as the house of eyes.

Peeping eyes from dungeon

Glancing up at the rare blue sky

Bashing eyelashes.

British Embassy on Wilhelmstrasse

By Michael Wilford

Cute! Probably an adjective that would draw frowns from any respectable diplomats. But this building pulled out the child in me, I felt like spinning, pushing the purple and lake blue blocks, and swinging myself on the post.

American corner on Pariser Platz

The US embassy is not completed yet but they still retain a strong hold on the platz – Museum the Kennedys and the green mermaid!

The musical building on Unter den Linden

Strings of metal plates from cymbals, with pictures too. Only they’re fixed there. Wonder if it’s vacant; it was locked and dark.

When I was lost…

Rare sight – old houses in front of an U-bahn station (perhaps refurnished after the bombing?)

Hm, looked Bauhaus, no?

Brandenburg Gate lit up

Blue wings. The back of Victoria and her chariot

I have huge difficulty in imagining the sand brown pillars of Brandenburg Gate dyed in neon lights. The alluvial historic significance of the gate would warp under the eye-burning flamboyances. But when night fell, I was rooted on Pariser Platz, eyes starry. A charming sight with a touch of modernity which I always associate with the capital.

Berlin – a gloomy beginning

Taken outside the Berlin’s old city government, Rotes Rathaus (the Red Hall). My first day. Alexanderplatz. A depressing day as there was no prospect at all of taking any passable pictures. During the five days I was there, the sun peered out only one morning, blinking in a sleepy state all the while and leaving thick grey sky to rule for the rest of my stay.

An endangered specie in Berlin – a spitting crocodile, badly in need of discipline.

A vase-bearer who neglects her duty. I don’t blame her – vibrant colours were so rare there, and the ground was not flooded.

Not another curious peeping splashing climbing lad! A retort shared by the seemingly indifferent but impatient guards all over the world, perhaps?

Defiance

What do you turn to communists? not bribery. But back.

The TV Tower was built by the GDR in the 1960s. After the unification of Germany, the Tower was turned into a tourist spot, a landmark that offers a birdeye view of the city.

An elegant vase-bearer in front of Rotes Rathaus.

Skip into art – architecture

Eiffel Town Quarter

Institut Francais de gestion
A beached brown vessel.

As I was deciding which was the best angle to take a picture of this, a four-year-old boy, his mum and dad were around, lingering under the crimson setting sun. It’s obvious, from the picture above, that despite all the climbing up and down, wringing my brain to shoot a good picture, I failed. The little boy was to blame. A sweet, constant distraction. I had to turn to his mum for help

- Il me dit mama?

- Oui

And when I left, he todded to follow. Hey, young man, you have blond hair. Smack! cute.

Le Totem

How can it bear such a rigid name? I would have it named The Mast or The Sails. The oblong black bars popping out are like tautly stretched sails, ready to plug the building up, to launch for the Seine

Novotel

The clay red frames remind me of rubber… bizzare connection. If that was so, imagine, leaning out of the window of your hotel room, resting your elbows on – no no no, not metal but soft, sticky rubber, how relaxing, like scurrying on mildly soft rubber-coated ground in playground, next to the slide, the swings and merry-go-round.

Square Bela Bartok

Superman avoids this park – an impressive stock of crypton bars! Are these white ones geniune or counterfeit though?

The kaleidoscope on Champs Elysees

There was one thing I gladly accepted and embraced in having to rush to the cinema on campus last year – missing the advert of Citroen. A painfully boring, unimaginative piece that dashed off any desire in me to get a Citroen car. The magic line was Give them something to watch (look at?), then in a room, a moustached middle-aged man, presumably a security guard, whirled round in a chair with a smirk, nosed towards screens connected to CCTVs in a carpark. There there there, a Citroen is gliding over – on a dull grey, blurred background. I must be slow and dumb not to feel any pleasure in scowling and narrowing one’s eyes, in smelling the screen, all to decipher the image shown is a ‘cool-looking’ car before receiving the sure reward of migraine.

An absolute ignoramus in motorcars, I know nothing about the automobile company, so can hold nothing against its products. But as an experienced ad-viewers, I regret I have to say the ad was marginally appealing, at best. After this blunt but unapologetic statement, one can imagine my bubbling, gasping amazment when ared and white slim glassy house gleamed in the sun at the corner of my eye, at discovering the building was Citroen’s show room (house?).

This show house redeems Citroen’s resputation, somewhat.

Motor cake

poorly built bird nest

Red kites flying

Division of districts according to Eyewitness Travel: Paris. DK. London: 2006