Weekly photo challenge: Friendship

I have several photos taken in Egypt of soldiers smiling together with their arms around each other, close mates in a time of war, establishing friendships unlike any they had back home.  This photo is interesting for its depiction of friends but also because of the background the photographer captured.  They seem to be standing on top of a building showing off Heliopolis, developed in 1905 as a model suburb of Cairo by Baron Empain, a Belgian industrialist.  One of the buildings he ordered his architects to design was the Roman Catholic Church (behind and to the left) known as the Basilica of the Virgin Mary, or l’Église Notre Dame d’Héliopolis, built in the heart of the new suburb in 1910.  It’s a small copy of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul.  When the baron died in 1929 he was buried in the crypt.

The mosque in the photo (behind and to the right) is described in the photo album as the ‘wailing mosque’.  It does not appear in any present day web photo search, nor on Google maps.  Many buildings have been demolished or altered during the last century, particularly during the 1970s, and this must have been one of them.

My father gave this photo the caption “S. Chambers”, though I don’t know which of them it is.

S. Chambers and friends, with the domes of the Roman Catholic Basilica and the suburb of Heliopolis, Cairo, in the background, 1941

Ailsa's travel photo challenge: Oceans

Readers, before I begin, I want to thank Ailsa for her challenge and her ideas here:  http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/06/08/oceans/

Oceans lap the Australian coastline on three sides.  To the east there’s the Pacific;  to the west, the Indian Ocean;  to the south, the Southern Ocean.  The northern coastline is lapped by seas not vast enough to be called ocean.  They’re the Timor Sea and the Arafura Sea, separating us from the islands of New Guinea and Indonesia.

In 1941 ships crossed the Indian Ocean to take Australian troops to the Middle East and back home again. The photo below shows the Aquitania leaving Sydney Harbour in 1941 before she was painted battle grey.  Before being assigned as a troopship the Aquitania had been a luxury liner in the Atlantic and before that she had served in the First World War.  She was the last surviving four-funnelled ocean liner.  The photo was possibly taken from the Queen Mary, another liner transformed into a troop carrier.  There was a convoy of converted liners in Sydney Harbour in April 1941 taking on board thousands of soldiers.  The Aquitania and the Queen Mary made a number of these journeys across the Indian Ocean and back.  Of course, Sydney is on the east coast of Australia and the ships were heading west, so it was a long trip just to get out of Australian waters, let alone across the Indian Ocean.  My mother told me that my father went on the Queen Mary, and his service record tells me he left Sydney on 1st September 1941 and arrived in the Middle East on 25th September.  About three weeks at sea.  On the ocean.

Aquitania, 1941

366 unusual things: days 154-158

2nd June –  My daughter-in-law, dressed as Madeline from the book by Ludwig Bemelmans, dropped in after work.  She works in a bookshop.

3rd June – Heard a woman on the news complaining of child care centre costs, saying it costs almost as much as she earns but she keeps working, anyway, so she doesn’t lose her skills.  But if she raised her own child she would gain great mothering skills.

4th June – An academic who said he doesn’t read people’s blogs responded to my arm-twisting today to read two paragraphs from one of my posts.  Only two.

5th June – The dog in the tiny yard opposite my place chases his tail all day, round and round, drilling circles in the dirt (mud today).

6th June – With my head in a rack of coats in a clothes shop, I heard a customer say she needed to change a top for a bigger size because the one she bought was “a bit snug around the middle”.  The shop owner said, “‘Must be all that meat”.  I thought, wow, that was a bit rude!  Then I turned and saw that the customer was the lady butcher from a few shops away.

Weekly photo challenge: Today

Today my husband and I went to Old Parliament House in Canberra for lunch.  We then played at being politicians in the old House of Representatives and acted as journalists recording an interview with an ex-Prime Minister (one of the activities for visitors).  As we left the building I took this photo of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the opposite side of the street, an unofficial and often-in-the-news embassy that has existed since 1972 on the lawns in front of Old Parliament House which, in 1972, was the only Parliament House.  A new, much much larger one has since been built on the hill  behind it.  The tents are out of view to the left and right but in the centre is the sacred fire which burns continually.  The two people to the left of the sovereignty letters are on segways which can be hired to ride around the lake, a popular weekend pastime.

Sacred fire and Sovereignty sign at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra, looking towards the War Memorial and Mt Ainslie, 3rd June 2012

Ailsa's travel photo challenge: Rhythm

Ailsa proposes ‘Rhythm’ as this week’s photo topic, which is great for me!  Since the WordPress weekly photo challenge is proposing ‘Today’ as a topic, I can’t draw on my father’s black and white photos from seventy years ago!  But I can for Ailsa.

See her Rhythm story here:  http://wheresmybackpack.com/2012/06/01/rhythm/

And here’s mine, the only photo from the album in which someone is playing a musical instrument.  I imagine this monkey is dancing to the beat.  It was amusing enough for a few people to stop and watch and for at least one soldier to stop and photograph.  My father wrote ‘Kan-Kan’ under the photo, so that must be the monkey’s name.

An Egyptian man with a dancing monkey is generally a beggar who lives on alms.  He is called a fakir (so I read), an Arabic word for ‘needy man’.  In Western countries, the use of animals for street entertainment is frowned upon now, though I did see some online  images of dancing monkeys in India and Pakistan.  I suppose it’s like busking;  there’s probably some talent involved in training the monkey.  But from then on it has to dance for its supper.  It’s something which leaves me ambivalent:  I have a real (Western) pleasure in Orientalist images, whether they be paintings or designs or photos like this one.  I feel the same when listening to gypsy music like that of Django Reinhardt, which makes sense:  the word gypsy comes from Egyptian.  The colourful elements of Middle Eastern life are like chocolate to me; they’re rich and mysterious.  Here’s to ancient peoples!  We owe them much.

Kan-Kan, Egypt, 1942

366 unusual things: days 149-153

28th May – Took some tartes au citron (French lemon tarts), made by me, to a French-Swiss friend.  Like taking flowers to a florist.  Got the recipe from her blog.  The recipe has ingredients for 3 large tarts, or 75 tartlets that might look like mine:

29th May – On The Voice, a TV singing competition, one of the contestants is a beautiful blind singer whose name is a palindrome:  Rachael Leahcar.

30th May – Another singer with a powerful voice drew this exclamation from her coach/judge, Seal:
“You’re possessed.  You must have done a deal with the devil to make that voice come out of you.”
But then he said,
“God bless you, darlin’.”

31st May – Just watched what looked like a red autumn leaf fluttering among yellow leaves on a tree.  But looking carefully I saw it was a red breast on a small grey bird.  A robin.  I’ve never seen one before.  They only pass through suburban gardens when migrating.

1st June – Read that Umberto Eco’s Italian original of The Name of the Rose has no semi-colons in it;  his machine didn’t have that key.