The Prettiest Town in Ireland

According to the tourist information, the small town of Adare (/æˈdr/; Irish: Áth Dara, meaning ”ford of [the] oak”) in County Limerick, Ireland, is one of Ireland’s prettiest towns.

When we visited, the weather was, as I guess the weather is most here, rainy with short glimpses of sun. And the village is pretty – with thatched roofs and brightly coloured houses. About 3000 inhabitants, so I felt rather at home – the same size as the village I live in. Above is the main street.

Despite the rain, we ventured out towards Desmond Castle, on the north bank of the river Maigue. And we were lucky – the sun came through!

 I will be away for a couple of days – see you soon!

Back to Ireland – Ruins and Cows

Looking through my photos from Ireland – I found an old abbey I had not posted on. I am convinced there were not many visitors, as we only saw it from the car. We were looking for a nice place to have our evening picnic – I wanted cows and my husband wanted ruins – and we found the perfect place!

To get there, we had to park at the church, climb some fences and walk a straight gravel road over the meadows with grazing cows. Just my thing.

I wondered how this abbey had looked when new – it was still impressive out there in the middle of all the green. Not much sun, but we had our fruit and sandwiches sitting on the ground against the wall. The Irish landscape offers never-ending glory.

The farewell was accompanied by the most gracious crowd (in the header), and lastly by a lone beauty standing by the road. I really have to go back to Ireland – soon.

 

Picture Critique

For a couple of weeks, Otto von Münchow kindly shares his expertise if you want an opinion about a picture – here is mine. Some suggested changes are not possible, the shot was situational, but the cropping is. So, I have followed his advice, and by comparing the photos you can see the difference it makes. I attended one of Otto’s online courses this summer, where he also stressed the importance of waiting for the right moment. I will have to practice that more… Thank you again, Otto!

Hi Otto! This is a photo taken in a cafe´in Lodz, Poland. I loved the colours and the people there, but how do I make the best of it? Thank you for taking your time and skills for this!

  • Otto von Münchow
    Leya

    This is a fun photo, playing with forms, shapes and colours—both natural as part of the room we look into as well as indirectly and as a juxtaposition in the mural on the wall in the back of the room. I think your framing is enhancing the playfulness in the room. You have a frame with in a frame by looking through a opening between two rooms, and not the least you have included a tiny bit of a red box to the right—probably a piece of furniture—and the blue seat to the lower left. It ends up being a composition with primary colours (from a traditional painters palette and not the additive primary colours), respectively yellow, blue and red. In contrast to all these geometric shapes, we have the organic forms of the people sitting in what is obviously a café. In fact, there is a hint of a fourth person around the column to the right. I like the smiling expression of the face of the woman obviously in conversation with this fourth person. It’s a little pity that the woman behind her, all the way towards the rear wall, is in her face, so to speak. Some separation between the faces would have made both of them stand out more clearly. You could have accomplished this by moving to the left, but then you would have left the bit of red furniture to the right out of the frame. The best thing would have been to await the situation, wait until the two faces had moved away from each other (but then of course you might have lost the smiling expression I mentioned before). One more detail: I think I would crop off a little bit of the yellow support in the upper part of the photo. Give it a try, at least this is easy to accomplish. In the end this is another captivating photograph.

Thank You All – And, Have a Great Weekend!

I Just want to send a heartfelt Thank You to WordPress Discover and to all my readers and followers, old and new,  who faithfully support this blog (and me!). Without you, life would lose this silver lining called blogging. Connecting worldwide, the possibility of meeting friends live, and helping each other to stay positive despite a troubled world. Thank you ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

 

Thursday Thoughts – Framed

Why do many/most people like…frames? (Or maybe not?) And what defines a frame?

This window photo displays some frames – photographed when I was looking out of my own hotel window. I like it, despite its drabness and ordinariness.

Many city windows look just like the one above…or like this one…

But a frame does not have to look like a window frame or a door frame…or a painting frame – it can be…different.

How many frames can you find in this photo?

And frames can be – very different!

It can stare at you in night light…

…or give you an irregular, sunlit moment.

So – what do you think about frames? Are you a compulsive frame user, or not? Do we need them at all?

The City’s Country Road

Of course there were colours in Łódź as well. And, when I think of the country road in my post this morning…with the oak trees on parade…These city alleyways seem truly related – even the one without trees. Somehow the urban equivalents?

The Unicorn Stable

Łódź is a tram city since 23 December 1898, and was the first city to have electrified trams in Poland.

In the years 1910-1931 suburban tram lines connected many important places around the city, creating the largest such network in Poland, unchanged until the end of the 1980s. In the first half of the 1990s, some of them were closed down, but Łódź is still the only city in the country to have such a system of commuter trams.

Personally, I love trams – the narrowness, the on-and-off and the streetscape they create. I am glad they kept them – and developed them as well!

According to Wikipedia,  the Municipal Communication Company of Łódź (MPK), currently operates 16 urban and 4 regional (or suburban) lines. The longest of these, and in fact the longest of all of Poland, is number 46, which has a length of 38 kilometres.

Trivia: Łódź once boasted a small cemetery where tram drivers were buried. Sadly, nothing remains of this graveyard, which was situated on Lindley Street near the aptly named Tram Street (ul. Tramwajowa).

When looking for more facts about the beautiful rainbow station, I came across this interesting blog by Daniel Wright, a freelance transport writer. And he describes it so well:

The Unicorn Stable (Piotrkowska Centrum tram station, Łódź, Poland)

Designed by Warsaw-based architecture practice Foroom, Piotrkowska Centrum is an unusually dramatic piece of tram architecture. If you like Santiago Calatrava’s work on railway stations, then you’ll like this. It has something of the same adventurous spirit and ostentatious engineering, but scaled down to the dimensions of Łódź’s narrow gauge (1,000mm) trams.

Wright claims the design of the station is drawing on the Art Nouveau details to be found on nearby buildings, but also the fact that it remains a practical piece of transport infrastructure.

The original plan had been to use glass panels in the roof, but instead a translucent plastic fabric, ETFE, was used  –  the same as in the roof at Southern Cross station in Melbourne. It is very light, but also very strong across a wide range of temperatures, making it ideal for Poland’s harsh winters.

 

This tram station has its own special beauty and a very suitable nickname: “The Unicorn Stable”. When I was a child, unicorns were all-white. These days, for some reason, most unicorns are represented with rainbow tails, and possibly manes, and some even have wings. So if they ever needed stables, this ethereal white structure with multi-coloured ‘glass’ roof would, I admit, be just the thing. In fact…I think I just caught a glimpse of…

 

 

Fresh Air and Art – The Modern Łódź Fabryczna

Vivi entered the B&W Challenge in my recent post…and if you look closely, you can see she is very impressed by this new railway station – and so was I – exploring it for more than an hour. Originally it was meant for high-speed-trains, but due to the latest estimated cost of 10 billion Euro, the high-speed line was put on hold.

Anyway, air and space, light and art – you cannot but feel good here!

Łódź Fabryczna is the largest and most modern railway station in the city. According to Wikipedia, it was originally constructed in the centre of Łódź, at the initiative of industrialist Karol Scheibler in 1865.

Art exhibition in two levels!

The old station was closed on October 16, 2011, and in June 2012 it was demolished to make way for the building of a new station below ground level. It reopened on 11 December 2016.

Today, we also noticed that our Swedish company, SKANSKA, is working the construction site nearby. What they are building? I have no answer to that.

 

 

 

 

Cee’s B&W Photo Challenge: Indoor Walkways/Hallways/Elevators

Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Indoor Walkways, Hallways, Elevators

Cee’s challenge means fun for me – and Viveka – in the new railway station in Łódź!

Lodz 2017 459