Sally Wakelin

The stories are true, Cuba is passion, heat, decay, music and vintage cars but so much more. After a regrettably short visit my mind and my mind’s eye are bursting with sounds and colours, people and sensations. I travelled with a small group of keen photographers in a coach over dusty pock-marked roads from Havana to CienFuego, to Trinidad and Santa Clara and finally back to Havana. My amigos also visited Vinales but a short interlude with the excellent Cuban health system prevented me from joining them. Frui runs holidays (with a photographic tutor) to Cuba and many other great destinations.

We flourished in the expert guidance of Giselle our Cuban chaperone and our driver Candito, who both went far beyond the call of duty to find us the perfect places and situations for our photographic purposes.

Cuba is not an easy country to understand, its history is complex and thrilling. Stuck as it is with the US trade embargo still in place, the Cubans are short of all sorts of modern and everyday products which are so familiar to us. Cuba is not short of welcome and rhythm. The salsa beat is with you day and night, sit down in a cafe and within moments a live band will be serenading you and musicians set up in the street in the most unlikely places. Tourism is Cuba ‘s money-maker, life there will change very quickly when the Castro dynasty ends, tourism will be the big draw for foreign entrepreneurs, who no doubt will suck away all the profits leaving the Cubans to make what they can with an infra-structure that has been starved of regeneration funds for more than 50 years.

Havana

Happy to be potographed for a small fee of 5 Cuban Pesos (c. 2p) — Happy to be photographed for a small fee of 5 Cuban Pesos (c. 2p)

There are not many new books to be had but there are good libraries and second-hand book stalls and shops abound.

Cuban life is lived on the streets, everyone has a chair or a box to sit on.

1930's Bacardi building and vintage car — 1930’s Bacardi building and vintage car

Spanish colonial style arcades provide welcome shelter from the sun as well as torrential rain. Tiny shops open at random selling hot drinks or cakes.

The heat and humidity slows you down, nothing is done in a rush, sit a while on a bench and enjoy the banter

Education is free for everyone, school uniform included.

There is music playing everywhere, even outside this long-abandoned building supposedly being re-constructed.

People

People, Photography

Blanket coat and a pastie — Great blanket coat and a pastie

Orange juice and a cigarette, putting the world to rights

Seen through a window, the scarf, the hand, the face in shadow, I wonder who he is.

The reddest hair and the blackest clothes — Vibrant orange hair and the blackest clothes

Serious and reflective with impeccable taste

On the way home from the market – thinking about lunch

Really - I'm not sure I agree — Really – I’m not sure I agree

Weimar and Erfurt

Architecture

Weimar is an elegant historic town, one of the most visited in Germany with its long cultural history and its political importance. The city has been home to the composers Lizt, and Bach, the writers, Goethe and Schiller and the artists and architects, Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Gropius at the Bauhaus, the most important German design school of the interwar period.
Standing high on a nearby hill is the memorial tower of Buchenwald concentration camp, it can be seen easily from almost every part of town serving as a reminder of its dark history.

Strolling around the town soon after dusk we came upon the start of an extraordinary evening, a musical event involving the whole town, it began in Theaterplatz, with people stood still, looking forward and holding various music players. There were to be concerts, community bell-ringing, everyone in the town contributing to the musical night. Alan Bern – Sound Installation

Sound Installation – comemmorating the 75th anniversary of the anti-Jewish pogrom throughout Germany on November 9/10, 1938 (“Kristallnacht”).

Unfortunately not speaking German, we had no idea of the events in store and instead of being part of it, we spent the evening elsewhere.

Long shadows on the wall in Kollegiengasse

Smoke around the moon in Platz Der Democratie

Gothe's Door Handle — Gothe’s Door Handle

Some visual notes from a short visit to Erfurt

Cars seen through steel gate, minimalist construction, tiny rivets, water-jet cut steel.

Berlin – Architecture, Streets and People

Architecture, People, Photography

Thomas - Expert Guide — Thomas – Expert Guide, joining the coach in Potsdamer Platz

One day in Berlin is not enough – of course! I was there to visit the Bauhaus Archives, the most comprehensive representation of information about the mid 20th C design school. I also enjoyed a 3 hour coach tour with a certain Thomas who was the most informed and amusing guide I have ever met. He skilfully took us around or past every historic point, every breath-taking piece of modern architecture with an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything Berlin has to offer the coach-bound traveller. Due to lack of time we could only leave the coach twice and for just a few moments, so many of the photos are compromised by having been taken through the coach window as the coach was moving.

Jewish Museum - Daniel Libeskind — Jewish Museum – Daniel Libeskind’s radical, zigzag design

Just one photograph hardly does justice to this complex building, light and shadows dance across the angled facades and jagged chasms and take your breath away. Daniel Libeskind

Berlin Hauptbahnhof – Meinhard von Gerkan

Meinhard von Gerkan The station looks particularly marvellous at night, streaks of light gliding through and out of the enormous glazed tube of a roof.

Topographie Des Terrors - Ursula Wilms (Heinle, Wischer and Partner) and the landscape architect Professor Heinz W. Hallmann — Topographie Des Terrors – Ursula Wilms (Heinle, Wischer and Partner) and the landscape architect Professor Heinz W. Hallmann

The external structure of steel rods or shafts catch the light and cast shadows giving the whole structure a nebulous appearance, quite the antithesis of the stern buildings that preceded it under the Third Reich. Ursula Wilm

The New Art Gallery - Mies Van de Rohe — The New Art Gallery – Mies Van de Rohe

Deutsches Technikmuseum - Helge Pitz and Hoh — Deutsches Technikmuseum – Helge Pitz and Hoh

IBA Housing - Zaha Hadid — IBA Housing – Zaha Hadid

Berlin Shell Haus Emil Fahrenkamp — Berlin Shell Haus – 1932 – designed by German architect Emil Fahrenkamp. Noted for its striking wave-like façade, and for being one of the first steel-framed high-rise buildings in Berlin.

Lots more building projects underway. — Judging by the number of cranes on the skyline, there are many more building projects underway.

bicycle and shed — Bicycle, tarpaulin and timber shed

At first sight this appears to be a man with no head! Actually he is bending his scarf-covered head forward sharply in order to better read his phone.