Travel Impressions and Images

Crumbling Walls and Bare Naked Trees

When I began my blog in August 2010 at the outset of our year of travels, I hoped to learn from doing. I knew only that I did not want the blog to be a diary or a journal.  But beyond that limitation, I had no clear sense of what I would find myself doing.

The starting point for our trips, which I thought might be reflected in what I wrote, was to see and to listen; to understand without judging; and to record the places, the people, the events, and the culture as we encountered them. Or maybe I should say, as I understood them. I intended to experience without prejudice.

Built into our program was the possibility that we might settle, however temporary and however oblivious, into the cultures hosting us. But because we intended to be residents not tourists, I suppose you might say we began with prejudice:  that to be a resident would afford a better understanding, a clearer view of whatever the culture offered.

It was, I think now, a high ambition, full of hope and leavened with optimism. It required a kind of quiet patience, such as shown by the little dog who waits patiently on the doorstep of the vicarage at St. Augustine's Church. Or at least a willingness to adapt to whatever life requires, as, I suppose, is true of this vine we found at a Buddhist temple in Busan.

And after a post or two, someone suggested I add pictures, since people like pictures and without them the words have a tendency to pile up.  So I learned to include pictures. It took a while, despite the ease of the process, because even simple technologies do not seem at all obvious to my manually oriented mind.

I had been taking photographs already, first as a memory aid for the writing that would come later, and then once persuaded to use them, as a way to illustrate in my blog.  A picture may not be worth a thousand words exactly, but it is worth a handful of words at least if it can be managed properly.

Almost immediately I realized I did not want to use pictures simply to illustrate my narratives. I don't have a story to go with this very Korean stone wall, so un-British, so un-American, yet I find it fascinating. Clearly the photographs would never be just a memory spur or just a way to fill out my word pictures.  I somehow came to understand that photographs are a source of information, emotional as well as logical, in their own right. 

At some point, they simply became a way of seeing things.

All that to say, the photographs are their own reason for appearing in the blog.  It would be too disturbing, I suppose, to say that they are a window into my mind. They are, rather, partners with the writing in exploring the territory, whatever that is.

And sometimes, as with these pictures of Grace Oh's babies taken at a restaurant in Seoul last March, they tell their own stories.