There aren’t many things in the world bigger than these:
For a size comparison, see the people walking ‘between’ the pyramids.
Not sure why the barbed wire was there.
Weekly photo challenge: Big
Weekly photo challenges: Happy & Animals
Today there are two photo challenges that I can meet with one photo: the weekly WordPress challenge to find a Happy photo, and Ailsa’s challenge to show animal photos. She has posted some excellent animal snaps to celebrate World Animal Day on 4th October: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/10/05/travel-theme-animals/
My picture does for both challenges. It comes from an album of WWII photos that my father brought home in 1941. Beneath this one he wrote ‘Syrian Bint’. The dictionary tells me that ‘bint’ is colloquial and perhaps offensive, but then, its origin is Arabic, meaning girl or daughter. So I’ll leave it as it is.
She’s beautiful.
Ailsa's travel photo challenge: Foliage
Ailsa has posted photos of autumn foliage this week and challenged us to do the same. Check out her photos: http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/09/28/travel-theme-foliage/
I have no idea what season it is in my photo (or rather, my father’s photo), but I’m guessing that in this boy’s part of the world it’s always warm enough to climb a tree. In bare feet! The photo suits not so much a foliage theme as a trunk theme. But if the boy climbs for long enough he’ll get to the foliage and more importantly to the dates.
Weekly photo challenge: Solitary
Another photo from my father’s war album. Table Mountain in Cape Town looks like a good place to be solitary (unless you’re with troops on their way to war).
This nurse wears the military uniform of Queensland nurses who joined up in 1940 and 1941 to accompany troops to the Middle East. I don’t know her name but I hope someone sees the photo some day and recognises her.
My father praised the nurses in his poetry. And when he returned home and married my mother, he wanted their first child, my sister, to be named after a particular nurse who had cared for him in the army hospital in Kantara near Cairo.
Weekly photo challenge: Everyday life
Everyday life for a soldier in Egypt in 1941 included some pretty unpostable activities: rifle practice, wrecking tanks, sinking ships, covering the bodies of dead comrades in the desert. However, the activity in this photo looks fairly harmless. My father captioned it ‘Shufty’, which comes from an Arabic word for ‘a look’, as in ‘take a shufty at this’.
Three curious things I’ve considered: What are the tubular projections behind the men? What is the Egyptian boy doing? Why is one man naked while all others are clothed?
Weekly photo challenge: Near and far
I found this photo in my father’s album from his time in Egypt in 1941/42 with the Australian Army. It’s simply captioned ‘Roxy Theatre’, though I’m not sure if it’s in Cairo or elsewhere. Searching online hasn’t turned up anything quite like it.
Weekly photo challenge: Merge
In 1912 and through the early part of the 20th century, Libya was colonised by Italians. In 1940 when Italy entered the war and sided with Germany, the Italians in Libya had to face the British forces (which included Australians) who were moving in from their bases in Egypt. In 1940 and 1941, after the two sides had battled, lost and won and again lost and won, tens of thousands of Italians were taken prisoner and were marched into camps in Egypt, later to be put on ships and sent to camps in Commonwealth countries including Australia. The photo below shows some of the thousands of captured Italians who were so battle-weary that they willingly followed their captors as prisoners of war.
The theme of ‘Merge’ brought this photo to mind. The Italians seem to be leaving the battlefield and merging into a stream of men, flowing towards an oasis in the desert. They wear great-coats because temperatures were low through the winter months, especially after dusk.
Weekly photo challenge: Wrong
Something is wrong about this photo. When an Englishman stands behind African men in one of their feluccas on their river in their country, when he is the passenger, not the worker, when he’s wearing a white pith helmet and smoking a pipe with his hands on his hips, it’s clear he’s dominating them. And that’s always wrong.
This confident colonial chap seems to have been living under a hot sun for quite a while; his skin is almost as dark as the sailors’.
Ailsa's travel photo challenge: Leading lines
Ailsa (http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/08/04/leading-lines/) has proposed that we find a photo containing ‘leading lines’. Well, I’m no photographer or artist, so this was a technical term I had to look up. I now know they are lines in an image that lead the eye to a point, either in or out of the picture. In my father’s 1941 album of Egyptian photos, there are a few urban scenes with streets disappearing into the distance. But in this one, below, the roads coming towards us are leading our eye to the centre of the photo.
It was taken in what was called, in the 1940s, Soliman Pasha Square, now known as Talaat Harb Square (Midan Talaat Harb), a short distance from Tahrir Square. In the centre of the square, in this photo, is a statue of Soliman Pasha which stood there from 1874 until 1964. Soliman Pasha was a general, born Joseph Anthelme Sève in Lyon, France, who served under Bonaparte and then in Egypt was a military expert in the army of Mohamed Ali. He converted to Islam and took the name Soliman Pasha.
At the far right of the photo is the once-opulent Groppi’s, formerly a Parisian-style café, tearoom and patisserie. Giacomo Groppi, a Swiss pastry maker, opened it in 1926 following success with other patisseries in Egypt. From the 1920s and through the war years, Groppi’s was the place to be seen. During the war, officers often stopped by for coffee or dinner or to find some female company.
While at the time this photo was taken the British were the resident colonials – hence the Australians were there defending Egypt – in the previous century it was the French who were leaving their mark. In the 1940s French influence is evident everywhere, not just the Frenchman on the plinth and the patisserie that sold pastries made from secret recipes written in French, but the architecture is also of French neoclassical style from the era of Soliman Pasha in the 19th century. Note some of the signs are also in French. In the late 20th century Egyptian governments wanted to remove reminders of colonialism and so today, so I’ve read, much of the European-style glamour is neglected and dusty. The statue of Soliman Pasha has now been moved to a military museum and a statue of Talaat Harb, an economist, stands in its place.
Weekly photo challenge: Growth
Egyptian camel and camelette enjoying each other. She’s a happy mother.
