| Thursday 10th December 2009 19:44MST | → 2 Comments |
I’ve always loved living in towns and cities (i.e. I’ve never been a fan of living in some remote village in the country comprising twenty people and as many sheep) and one thing I love most is artificial light. Quite often I wander up to the top of Pewley Down, which is effectively just across the road, and look across the whole of Guildford at night.
Another is the skyline of Chicago, specifically the area called The Loop. I came across this night photo in Wikipedia (click for a full-size image).
Beautiful.
| Sunday 6th December 2009 10:28MST | → 2 Comments |
I came across this blog post on Japanese addresses (there’s an associated video that explains it ever better), which was, amongst other things, an exercise in discovering how other cultures do things not only differently but seemingly the complete opposite to what you’ve taken for granted in your own culture.
It made me think of when Terry first visited Guildford (where I live) and kept trying to make use of the term ‘block‘ to describe distances - an approach that works very well in grid-layout cities in the USA, such as Madison:
… but doesn’t work at all in Guildford:
Of course, we know the origin of this: the layout in Madison was designed whereas it evolved organically in Guildford, with some roads simply being based on ancient bridleways. Ironically, I personally found Madison harder to navigate for the first few years - possibly because rectilinear road layouts all appeared the same to me so were more difficult to visualise (and memorise) than roads that are unique in the path they followed.
Cultural dissonance on both sides.
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