Weekly Photo Challenge: Pattern

March 31, 2013 – Day 618

The photographic theme this week is…
The photographic theme this week is…
The photographic theme this week is…
The photographic theme this week is…
The photographic theme this week is…
The photographic theme this week is…

…patterns.

WordPress wants to see a picture that represents a pattern and so I will repeat myself and show you another picture of the central checkerboard floor that forms the center open-air space of the Museo de Arte in Lima (MALI).

Oh, look, there’s my daughter as she breaks up the pattern.

Weekly Photo Challenge: From Above

March 31, 2013 – Day 618

“From Above” is this week’s theme from WordPress.

Today’s response comes from the outing the family took to soak up some culture as we visited Museo de Arte in Lima, also known as MALI.

The building is a rectangle and in the center is a spacious center that looks like it would do a good job of hosting all manner of outside events. On this particular Sunday, this space was empty save its checkerboard-style black and white tiles and the four of us.

For no reason whatsoever except that I liked the effect, I decided to take a snapshot of one of the shiny black tiles while standing right over it.

A photo with a reflective quality

In one of those series of photos that I took, which I have submitted above as my response, my daughter photobombed me.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Up

February 1, 2013 – Day 560

Today’s photo is my response to WordPress’s Weekly Photo Challenge that has the topic of “Up“

In February, the family took a cruise/vacation where our first port of call was the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. As mentioned in a previous post, part of our scenic looksie through the city that will host the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games was to make a stop at the statue known as Christ the Redeemer.

Here is my “up”lifting photo.

I look forward to the upcoming themes from WordPress such as toy stories, a bug’s life, and monsters.

Park of the Fountains

March 28, 2013 – Day 615

Over the Semana Santa (Holy Week) holiday during the Thursday and Friday before Easter, our family took the opportunity to visit some sights around Lima that we had not yet seen.

High on that list was the Parque de la Reserva (Park of the Reserve). Completed in 1929, this public green space was built to honor those who fought in the battles of San Juan and Miraflores during the War of the Pacific (1879 – 1883) where Peru and Bolivia fought against Chile.

As a side note, and to highlight the fact that some folks are still steamed over the outcome of that conflict (over a century+a score+a decade ago), the government of Bolivia has gone to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to obtain the coastal land it lost to Chile.

In other ICJ news, Peru and Chile are awaiting the Court’s ruling on Peru’s petition to redraw the maritime boundary between their two countries.

However, all of that judicial and military maneuvering flowed to the back of our minds as we enjoyed a lovely evening walking around the park’s signature feature, El Circuito Mágico del Agua (The Magic Water Tour).

The tour is a series of a baker’s dozen of distinct and different fountains. Each one is numbered and named.

The Tour is best seen at night when the floodlights makes the dancing waters sparkle. We arrived near dusk.

Fuente de la Cupula Visitable

I also learned a valuable lesson for tourists. I learned that one needs to make sure that the battery in the digital camera is charged up before going on an outing. Sadly, I neglected to check the level of electric charge in my trusty camera and so right after I took the above picture, I was greeted with the “Recharge battery” message.

Ignoring the mocking green letters on my camera’s screen, I was able to squeeze out a few more images (seen below) before my camera truly gave up it lithium-ion ghost.

My apologies for the grainy, fuzzy nature of these photos. I’d like to say that I used some sort of Instagram filter on them, but as I said before, I had little battery life and so I only had a few seconds to turn the camera on and take whatever shot I could before my camera died.

Fuente Magica

The above fountain, Fuente Magica, is the tallest of the thirteen. People are not allowed in it, but that doesn’t mean the fine folk of Lima couldn’t enjoy a cool blast of water on a March evening.

Fuente Laberinto de Ensueno

Two days later, we went from the wet to the dry as we visited Caral.

Photo Friday: Natural Light

February 11, 2013 – Day 570

The picture below is my response to the Photo Friday challenge of “natural light“.

In February of this year, the family made a trek out to Iguazu Falls (as mentioned before here and here), a stunning natural wonder of falling water that straddles the border of Brazil and Argentina.

As this week’s challenge is all about natural light, please allow me to show you what happens when sunlight interacts with droplets of water.

Why are there so many songs about these arcs?

As you can see from some previous postings (like here and here), I’m a sucker for arcs of color.

An OK Caral

March 30, 2013 – Day 617

So how did you spend your Saturday before Easter Sunday?

We went to an archaeological site.

To be more specific, we drove north of Lima to Caral, considered to be the oldest city in the Americas.

After a three-hour drive north – of which the last twenty kilometers was done on a road that had not been paved since Caral was last inhabited – we arrived. This is the entrance sign in all of its glory letting you know you have arrived.

There’s a sign post up ahead

Caral is located in a desert. This should help you understand why all the next series of pictures are rather bichromatic (tan bottom half / blue upper half).

Worth more than $20,000

We were assigned a guide as that is the only way to tour Caral. There are no free-range tourists at this site. As there are no ropes, fences, string, or any other barriers to keep the crowds off the ruins, having an ever-present guide is a good way to keep the rocks where they have been for the past five millennia.

The highlight of Caral are the pyramids which may even be older (but not larger) than the pyramids at Giza.

Twin Peaks

In front of the main structures at Caral Alto was a pit that – according to our guide – served as a sacred space for the upper echelons of the Caral citizenry. This picture below doesn’t do the structure justice, but you’ll see an aerial shot of the place at the “Thank You” sign

Take those stairs and you’re movin’ on up

After a ninety-minute tour of the ruins, we were done. We knew we had completed our journey when we saw the sign thanking us for our visit. Politeness is always appreciated when one is dusty, hot, and thirsty.

Y’all come back now, y’hear

And, yes, the exit here does drop you off at the gift shop / refreshment center.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Color

February 4, 2013 – Day 563

My response to the theme of color from WordPress is below…

A horse of a different color

These colorful equine statues and the buildings you see are a small part of the La Boca neighborhood of the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires.

When Art Imitates Life

March 10, 2013 – Day 597

On this Sunday, we had a cultural outing. I had seen that an art gallery located in the heart of downtown Lima was having a unique showing and I wanted to take the family along. Entitled…well, why let me write it when I can show you the actual brochure…

From Picasso to Banksy

In the Galeria Municipal de arte Pancho Fierro – located footsteps away from the Presidential Palace – there were about forty pieces of art that were all from the collection Jose Tola, a Peruvian painter.

Owning original pieces of work from the two namesakes of this exhibition was amazing enough, but there was more. Here was one of the pieces on display by the English-based graffiti artist, Banksy.

Banksy Dorothy Stop and Search

Along with the Picasso are some other names you might have heard of…

A Fearsome Foursome

In the upper-left is Pablo Picasso’s Nature Morte. That’s a Miro in the lower-left corner and a Dali in the lower-right of this picture. In the upper-right, to complete this quartet, is a piece by Sonia Delaunay.

There were also works by Magritte, Warhol, and Shepard Fairey. Although, in an odd twist, the labels of Fairey’s pieces had his name listed as “Shepard Fairey.Obey”. I’m wondering if someone knew about Mr. Fairey’s first well-known piece of street art, The OBEY sticker campaign, and thought it was his last name. Since I don’t have Sr. Tola’s phone number, I’ll never know.

However, this post is about an interesting bit of timing I saw while at the gallery. There was one work by the Spanish collection artists known as Equipo Cronica, which looks like this…

Lady under glass

This creative work is known as Mariana y las moscas (Mariana and the Flies). If you look closely at the picture, you can see that there are painted flies all over the painted subject of the painting. But wait…what’s that on the right part of the frame?

It’s a pop-up

Yep, it’s a fly on a frame about a painting about flies.

Considering this was an exhibit about modern art and street art, it would not have surprised me that this insect was glued onto the frame. However, after about ten seconds, the fly took off and went to see the Lichtenstein.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Future Tense

January 20, 2013 – Day 548

“Future Tense” is this week’s photographic challenge from WordPress. I have to admit that I did not follow the theme exactly as advertised. The creators for this month’s challenges has been calling March “phoneography month” and asking people to take pictures with their camera-phones. As I do not have such a device, I must rely on Siglo XX technology and my response comes to you courtesy of my plain ol’ digital camera.

One of the suggestions for this week’s theme was to capture the experience of waiting. This is the option for me.

On this Sunday in January, the family and I went to a local Lima amusement park called La Granja Villa. This location was a delightful way to spend a Peruvian weekend and I’ll try and remember to post more pictures about our stay.

There was one ride – and one passenger – that I simply had to capture on film bits and bytes. He is waiting so I belive he fits the theme, but he is not someone I would expected to be on this ride.

Will he yell, “Whee!” ?

This gentleman is certainly waiting for the ride (and dare-I-say, “excitement”) to start. I also like this photo for the theme because I believe that this image shows a man who can look to his past and see the fun he once had at parks like this; but he also continues to look to the future to see what other fun he can still have.

I also like this guy because he is on the bouncy mechanism by himself. He did not strap himself in to be with his son or granddaughter. NO! He took his place on the far left-hand side because he wanted to ride that ride.

He stares off into the distance – waiting, hoping, dreaming – for the fun that is about to commence.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Lunchtime

“Lunchtime” is this week’s theme from WordPress.

Normally, this here blog is all about Peru. However, since I already posted a picture about my new favorite pre-lunch Peruvian snack, cancha, in a previous posting, I will have to travel to another South American country to answer the challenge.

This post finds us in Brazil. Actually, it is the food court that resides inside the main international airport in Sao Paolo, but that still means we are in Brazil.

In my almost two years in Peru, I have not been all that surprised to see fast-food joints from the United States show their golden arches, finger-lickin‘ goodness, or Whopper-ishness in and around Lima. McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Burger King are all international brands and so their existence south of the Equator was not a shock.

What was a shock was, while walking around the Brazilian airport food court looking for a place to have lunch, when I laid eyes on a brand of hamburgers that I had not seen since I lived in southern half of the Golden State. Branded as Hardee’s east of the Mississippi River, I was not at all expecting to see hamburgers being offered up by Carl’s Jr, a wholly Californian eatery. But there it was…

What is “star” in Portuguese?

My apologies for only having a close-up of the menu board, but it has been my experience that cashiers (and especially managers) of fast-food places tend to frown upon people taking pictures.

Anyway,….

What I like about this picture is that almost everything about it is instantly recognizable to the devotee of the handiwork of Carl Karcher. From the font used in the text of “Star Burger” to the picture of the burger itself, I would assert (because an upstanding lad like myself never swears) that I was in San Diego, Los Angeles, or Whittier.

However, there are some tell-tale signs that one is not in Southern California while looking at this sign. The first is the price. Now while Carl’s Jr does have the $6 Burger and while we are at the airport (where prices are higher), it is not many fast-food places that would sell a sandwich for $14.90. Since we are in Brazil, they use reals (R$) and at an exchange rate of one Brazilian real to fifty US cents, this basic burger sells for  $7.45 (which is actually in line with what a burger at an airport should cost). The combo sets you back $11.45 in greenbacks.

Also notice that this burger is advertised as “com queijo”, which is Portuguese for “with cheese”.

Oddly enough, the Wikipedia entry for Carl’s Jr. says the chain is in the process of expanding into Brazil. I guess someone needs to update the article since the chain with the smiling star is in Brazil as of last February.

The same article says that there are a pair of Carl’s Jr here.

Interesting.