Category Archives: Human Interest

Paris Rendezvous — Part Four

The latest post is a sprinkling of images from our last days in Paris. It was a very compressed 5-day visit during an intense heatwave.

View of the Eiffel Tower from the Avenue de La Bourdonnaise in Paris.

Resting in the shade by a cooling water garden in back of the Musee Quai Branly in Paris. The Rue de L’Universite.

This isn’t chalk — these are painted designs on the bicycle and scooter lane alongside the Quai D’Orsay in Paris. Can’t find any information about what the marks mean!

Dinner at the Brasserie Terminus Balard in Paris.

Next up — a post full of images taken by Mark Harmes in Paris!

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©Deborah Harmes 2007-2018 and
©A Wanderful Life 2007-2018
Please respect the words and images on this page.
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Paris Rendezvous — Part Three

One of the most delightful aspects of visiting a cultural hub like Paris is the availability of things to do each day! This large and fascinating museum — Musee Quai Branly — was completely new to me.

After I finished taking photos on the Pont de L’Alma bridge overlooking the Quai D’Orsay and the Seine, we turned around and hugged the shady side of the pavement on Quai Branly. The sun was eye-wateringly bright and the temperatures were over 30 degrees celsius in the shade. The architectural style of the museum was a wonderful surprise. Both the colours and the exterior layers of planting and building placement were quite enjoyable to stroll through.

The museum is vast and contains collections from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and the Americas — all spread out over multiple levels in a gloriously contemporary set of buildings. The photos below are a mere sample of what there is to see!

Mayan statue in one of the collections of the Musee Quai Branly in Paris.

Musee Quai Branly restaurant set in the gardens of this extensive Seine-side museum in Paris.

Exterior ticket office within the cluster of contemporary buildings at the Musee Quai Branly in Paris.

Massive carved sandstone head from Oceania in the Musee Quai Branly in Paris.

Quite funny to watch all of these adults scampering from area to area whilst participating in some sort of corporate team-building scavenger hunt. This was going on all over the various levels of the Musee Quai Branly in Paris.

One of a collection of masks from the Pacific Northwest of North America at the Musee Quai Branly in Paris.

One of a collection of masks from the Pacific Northwest of North America at the Musee Quai Branly in Paris.

COPYRIGHT
©Deborah Harmes 2007-2018 and
©A Wanderful Life 2007-2018
Please respect the words and images on this page.
All rights reserved.

Photo of the Day: The Overwhelming Urge To Sleep!

Giving in to the overwhelming urge for a nap, this older couple simply parked on a street in England, locked the car, and gave in to that urge. They were completely oblivious to the amused pointing and kindly laughter of everyone passing by. Sweet, eh?

An older couple in England were apparently overwhelmed by the urge to sleep!

Hot Pants and Big Hair

It was such a retro look that my head fairly well snapped when I saw it on ample display in Newcastle Upon Tyne in the north of England. Really ‘Big Hair’ on women of all ages. I don’t think I’ve seen such a generous use of the teasing comb and cans of hairspray to create that sort of back-combed volume since the 1960s.

What was even funnier was that we were in a vintage bookstore at one point during our four weeks up there and there was a book on sale that was a ‘Look Back to 1960s Newcastle’ — and all of the women in that book would have been the mothers or grandmothers of the people we were seeing on the streets. Some of the folks in the North of England seem to have gotten stuck in a time warp!

Regional trends included the messy buns — the sort of teased up and pinned up look that Brigitte Bardot used to do so well — or tight buns — teased up and smoothed into not-a-hair-out-of-place firmness with gel or hairspray. And we saw this look on women from teenagers to senior citizens. We were checking out at the grocery store one afternoon and it was everything I could do to not snap a quick pic with my iPhone of the middle-aged check-out clerk who had a bright red beehive hairdo that was towering above her small face!

Then there was the range of hot pants on display (on some icy days in February?) — thankfully on the really young girls and not on the middle-aged gals who shared their love of Big Hair with a large percentage of the Newcastle demographic. Interesting too that once we returned to London and Norfolk from our month up north, we never saw a beehive, teased bun, or hotpants look down there!

Apologies for the graininess of some of these. I did snap a few of them on my phone!

Teased up back-combed hair on young girls in a Newcastle mall going from the most bouffant on the left to the least voluminous on the right. This was taken on an icy cold day at the end of February.

Interesting fashion and hair at the hardware superstore.

Two young girls with teased chunks of hair sitting on the floor in a shopping mall.

Two young girls with teased chunks of hair sitting on the tile floor in a shopping mall.

Hotpants (even on the coldest winter day!) and big teased up hair are very popular amongst the teenagers of Newcastle in the UK.

Hotpants (even on the coldest winter day!) and big teased up hair are very popular amongst many of the teenagers of Newcastle in the UK.

Ice Cream in Winter — By The Sea?

When Mark and I met in London at the beginning of 1994, I commented one afternoon on an activity that the Brits engaged in — quite regularly — that I considered to be quite odd behaviour given the weather.

That activity? Eating ice cream — LOTS of it — usually in cone form — in the dead of winter. No matter how icy the temperatures were, we saw people in every city we visited perched on a ledge eating an ice cream cone or sitting on a bench at the seaside doing the same thing. There might be ice on the roads, occasionally even a smattering of snow, but there they sat, bundled up to the eyeballs and eating an ice cream.

What I found even odder, and sweetly funny, were the people who would drive to the seaside to purchase their ice cream from a mobile van or a beachside hut and then sit in their car with the heater running as they gobbled it down whilst watching the icy waves crashing upon the seashore.

Even on the coldest winter day, British people seem to love to go to the seaside to sit in their heated cars, staring at the crashing waves in freezing temperatures, and eat an ice cream cone.

The lighthouse at Whitley Bay, a seaside town near Newcastle UK, on a stormy winter day.

So here we were on a wintery day two years ago in the north of England, at Whitley Bay on the seacoast just outside of Newcastle. The wind was so high that afternoon that it knocked me sideways when I got out of our own vehicle! The second picture that is just of the seaside and the lighthouse is a more accurate idea of how bleak it was that day. Absolutely no one was game to sit on those seaside benches to watch the waves on that particular afternoon. Brrr!!!

But back in the parking lot — yes — the Mr. Whippy van was doing a good business. The lot near the lighthouse was full of people happy to sit with their engines running and the heater on as they ate their ice cream and watched the crashing surf beyond. Crazy, eh? Or just sweetly eccentric perhaps.

Photo Of The Day: The Clever Commuter

I am continuing to go through unedited images to upload to my own portfolio site as well as my agencies in Europe, the UK, and New York. And I continue to discover new images that really speak to my love of human interest photography — my same primary interest back when I was a newspaper photographer.

This was taken in Berlin, Germany — and the man in the pic was a commuter at the end of his day — taking his bike down from street level into the train station below for his commute home via the wonderful train system in Berlin.

Enjoy!

A man taking his bicycle down an escalator into the train station below the street level in Berlin, Germany.